Dr Bob Gomersall, B.Sc., Ph.D., C.Phys., M.Inst.P., FRSA, was educated at the universities of Durham and Bristol and worked as a theoretical physicist at the Max Planck Institute, Stuttgart. He taught physics at Manchester Grammar School and Bradford Grammar School (where he was Head of Physics). He founded his first business (BTL – now known as Surpass Assessment) as a ‘side hustle’ in 1985, followed by Virtual College in 1995 and Advanced Digital Innovations in 2005. He was a long-standing board member of HF Holidays and is currently a national vice-president.
Bob has a particular interest in innovation. He is a ‘Business Angel’ and has invested in a range of start-up businesses. He is the author of many academic papers and the creator of the Complete Physics and Advanced Physics CD-ROMs, which were amongst the world’s first multimedia educational titles.
He is married with four grown-up children, all graduate engineers.
https://bobgomersall.com/
Puran Prem Kaur, also known as Emma Martin, is a Kundalini Yoga teacher (level 1, i-SKY), teaching Yoga and Meditation in the London Borough of Bromley. Committed to making the life-changing practice of Yoga accessible to everybody, she also has a Yoga for All qualification, as well as a Foundation Certificate with the British Wheel of Yoga.
Alison Jones is a publisher, podcaster, speaker and book coach, founder of Practical Inspiration Publishing and host of The Extraordinary Business Book Club podcast. She worked as an editor and publisher with leading companies such as Chambers, Oxford University Press and Macmillan, most recently as Director of Innovation Strategy at Palgrave Macmillan until she left to set up her own publishing imprint.
Through her training and coaching programmes she enables business leaders and entrepreneurs to deepen their thinking and communicate more effectively, using their writing to build a platform for their expertise and business success.
A champion of the value of books for businesses, she is a former Head Judge of the Business Book Awards in the UK and recommends and reviews business books for the thousands of subscribers to her weekly newsletter.
She has written and edited several books, including This Book Means Business (2018) and Exploratory Writing (2022), speaks regularly at industry and business events (she has twice chaired the London Book Fair’s Quantum conference), and regularly contributes articles on business books and business writing to press and other publications. In 2022 she delivered a TEDx talk, ‘Let’s Rethink Writing’.
Experienced founder and CEO, Ollie Henderson, pivoted his career while juggling the pleasures and pressures of raising a young family. He believes work/life balance is a myth. Rather than seeing career and personal life as two opposing forces, Ollie argues that the secret is to design an integrated approach that allows them to work in harmony. He is passionate about helping others – particularly those like him who have young children – develop the skills to manage their time better.
Ollie’s weekly newsletter, Future Work/Life, provides news and analysis to thousands of people interested in the future of work, covering subjects like creativity and innovation, data and technology, peak performance, productivity, wellbeing, and workplace culture. He also presents a Top 10 Careers podcast, which has featured bestselling authors, chart-topping podcasters, world champion athletes, and leaders of some of the world’s most successful businesses as guests.
Ollie delivers consultancy and tailored insights about the future of work to high-growth business leaders and their teams, and mentors entrepreneurs starting their business journeys.
Beth Stallwood is a people development expert, with an impressive track record of enabling people to achieve their career and life goals. She’s a sought-after speaker and facilitator and talks to thousands of people about personal development, human leadership and making workplaces fabulous.
Beth trained as an executive Coach and Mentor with the Oxford School of Coaching and Mentoring and spent 15 years working with current and future leaders as they transitioned into senior roles.
She set up her consulting business in 2017, partnering with leading edge organisations, across investment, sport, education, public sector, media,and technology, to transform the way they engage, develop and lead their people.
She’s on a mission to help individuals cultivate more joy at work AND to help organisations develop cultures that allow that to happen, creating that rare prize: Employee and Employer Win-Win.
Sarah Taylor, founder of ThriveWise, is a wellbeing expert with a PhD in health and wellbeing, combining academic insight with practical experience as an accredited health and executive coach, trainer and speaker. She works with purpose-driven leaders and organizations to develop strategic wellbeing solutions that address systemic, team and individual needs to prevent burnout and create healthy, sustainable performance.
Alice Sheldon is the creator of Needs Understanding.
After graduating from Oxford University with an MA in Psychology and Neurophysiology, her strong interest in how we can contribute to the creation of a more inclusive world took her on a career journey which included being a secondary school teacher, a barrister, and the head of the Bar’s national pro bono charity, working with everyone from homeless litigants to the Lord Chief Justice.
During this time Alice came across two life-changing pieces of understanding. The first was psychotherapy, which inspired a deep learning journey. The second was Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which led her to become a Certified Trainer with the Center for Nonviolent Communication. Following this she developed a model of partnership parenting, and for a decade helped hundreds of fellow parents to create thriving relationships with their children by teaching them how to shout less and laugh more. This became the springboard for her creation of the Needs Understanding model, which brings a partnership approach into all spheres of life.
Alice shares Needs Understanding globally with individuals and organizations.
Mike Jones is a strategy advisor, organizational psychologist and founder of LBI Consulting. He works with CEOs, boards and senior teams in large, complex, highly regulated organizations across public and private sectors, including Network Rail, the NHS and Amazon. A former British Army soldier, he led on operations and taught leadership at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst before being medically discharged. That experience left him sceptical of tidy plans and focused on how decisions play out in contact with reality.
His work centres on closing the gap between declared strategy and the real patterns of decision-making, trade-offs and behaviour in organizations. A practitioner of systems thinking and complexity-informed strategy, Mike helps leaders move beyond strategy theatre to build organizations that adapt while they act. He hosts the Strategy Meets Reality podcast and writes the Strategy Meets Reality Substack for a growing international audience of senior leaders.
Celia left a senior role in the NHS after frustration and work-related stress made her question her life and became the springboard to start her own business.
Over the next few years she transformed a neglected hill farm in Bolton into a multi award-winning wedding and events venue – The Wellbeing Farm.
She unites savvy business understanding with a passion for self-development that can’t fail to inspire you to transform your own life.
As an executive coach, trainer and facilitator, Jane Moffett has over 20 years of experience working with women at key points of change in their lives where the professional and the personal intersect. She writes and publishes regularly in this area and is a member of staff at the Coaching Centre at Henley Business School and the Women and Work All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG).
