The Leading Speakers Bureau

Former Wal-Mart Executive

Michael Bergdahl is a full-time motivational speaker, author and writer. Bergdahl worked in Bentonville, Arkansas for Wal-Mart, as the Director of “People” for the headquarters office, where he worked directly with Sam Walton. It was Sam Walton who gave Bergdahl the nickname, “Bird Dawg”! He has recent experience as a turnaround specialist, successfully working with American Eagle Outfitters & Waste Management & is considered an authority on Wal-Mart.

“A storyteller who weaves entertainment into his motivational business messages”

[expand title=”In detail”] Michael began his career in an entrepreneurial, highly successful, family-owned newspaper publishing business in Houston, Texas. In his next position, he got his hands dirty on the manufacturing side of the petrochemical industry in J. M. Huber Corporation’s, Carbon Black Division in Baytown, Texas. He was later recruited by Frito Lay (a subsidiary of PepsiCo) to assume a position in their sales organization.[/expand]

[expand title=”What he offers you”]He will enhance the content of your meetings by communicating the sales, service and employee performance expertise to your audience that he gained from his experiences working in Consumer Packaged Goods at Frito-Lays, Discount Retailing at Wal-Mart and Speciality Retailing at American Eagle Outfitters. Michael Bergdahl is the ideal choice for keynotes, breakouts and workshops.[/expand]
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Shipping Analyst

Martin Stopford joined Clarkson’s in 1990 and was previously a Vice President at Chase Manhattan Bank and a Director of British Shipbuilders. He was appointed to the Board of Clarkson’s in September 2004. Clarkson’s, the world’s leading shipping services provider, is a dynamic organisation at the forefront of change within the industry, an industry estimated to be worth in excess of $100 billion p.a.

“The UK’s leading expert on the Shipping Industry”

[expand title=”In detail”] At Clarkson’s Martin is proud of his ship broking heritage and the combination of experience with a high level of energy has spawned a number of new ideas and initiatives which are propelling the group towards broadening its range of shipping services. These new initiatives include both ship owning and ferry operations within a newly formed logistics division.[/expand]

[expand title=”What he offers you”]Martin offers audiences great insights into industry leading research and consultancy. He talks in great detail about his work partnering core strengths with the innovation of his project and development section resulting in his unrivalled position as an adviser to the Shipping Industry and the first port of call for large corporate entities[/expand]
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Trend Spotter Extraordinaire and Innovation speaker

Magnus Lindkvist is a future trends speaker who offers insightful and tangible solutions to companies wishing to grow their business in an organic way. He is the founder of the trend agency Pattern Recognition who helps companies to make sense (and money) out of the future. Furthermore, he is the creator of “Trendspotting and Future Thinking”, one of Europe’s first academically accredited courses in the subject.

“Where the day takes you, that’s where you’re going”

[expand title=”In detail”] Previously he worked as a brand strategist at Differ and for the brand strategy agency, Grow. As a member of TED and The Long Now Foundation, Magnus combines a passionate interest in the future with a strong desire to share insights that has made him one of Europe’s most sought-after future trends speakers. He is also a course director at Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, a collaborative partnership between Stockholm School of Economics, The Royal Institute of Technology, The University College of Arts, Crafts and Design and Medical University Karolinska Institute.[/expand]

[expand title=”What he offers you as a keynote speaker”]Magnus Lindkvist will inspire and provoke you into better future-thinking. He considers what is happening now and in the future and how it affects how we do business. He gives businesses a tangible and simple call to action on how to adapt to these future trends to develop and market their products and services.[/expand]

[expand title=”How he presents as a keynote speaker”]Magnus is an energetic and exciting future trends speaker who in his fun and fact-filled tailored presentations, uses humour to deliver great insights about the trends that will shape your business.[/expand]
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Founder of the Grameen Bank and Winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize

In 1976, Muhammad Yunus founded the Grameen Bank to make loans to poor Bangladeshis. Since then the Grameen Bank has issued more than US$ 5.1 billion to 5.3 million borrowers. The success of the Grameen model has inspired similar efforts throughout the developing world and even in industrialized nations including the USA. His methods have also been applied to Burma and in Kosovo with great success and he is now embarking upon an effort to eliminate global poverty.

Professor Muhammad Yunus has been ranked among the top 50 most influential business thinkers. In 2009 Thinkers 50, the global ranking of management gurus, placed him among the list of most influential thinkers

“By giving poor people the power to help themselves, Dr. Yunus has offered them something far more valuable than a plate of food – security in its most fundamental form.” Former US President Jimmy Carter

[expand title=”In detail”] Besides Grameen Bank he has created a number of companies in Bangladesh to address diverse issues of poverty and development. Among the companies are Grameen Phone (a mobile telephone company), Grameen Cybernet (Internet Service Provider), Grameen Communications (Rural Internet Service Provider), Grameen Software company, Grameen Information Technology Park, Grameen Fund (Social Venture Capital Company), Grameen Capital Management company and many more.[/expand]

[expand title=”What he offers you”]Muhammad Yunus is a highly charismatic figure with a wealth of innovative ideas and the power to help thousands of people to decide their own destiny. He carefully explains to audiences his ideas and lays the foundations for the successful implementation of his model which is eradicating poverty around the globe.[/expand]

[expand title=”How he presents”]An empowering and emotive speaker, Muhammad Yunus talks passionately about his goals and dreams and leaves audiences inspired with his simple yet effective ideas.[/expand]
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Leading Trendspotter, Futurist and Strategist

Marian Salzman is considered as one of the world’s top five trendspotters. She is the CEO of Havas PR North America, an entrepreneurial agency ranked ninth in the world. Marian was responsible for some of the most famous consumer campaigns and has executed thought leadership, reputation management and social media programs around the globe. Before heading Havas PR, she was CMO at Porter Novelli, CMO at JWT Worldwide and CSO at Euro RSCG Worldwide. She received many prestigious awards, including the the PRWeek’s 2009 PR Innovation of the Year award.

“One of the Top Five Trendspotters in the World”

[expand title=”In detail”] Marian is an advisor to the Berlin School of Creative Leadership’s MBA program, author of 14 books published in more than 20 languages and an honours graduate of Brown University for which she has served as a mentor to Brown Women in Business since 2006. Her four-part series on the brain for the Huffington Post won a 2011 Bronze SABRE award and an honorable mention from the PR News Platinum PR Awards. In addition, Marian has blogged regularly at Forbes.com, the Holmes Report, Adweek/Aol’s Fuel the Future, CNBC.com and numerous agency blogs run by @havasprus.

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[expand title=”What she offers you”]Marian has identified and taken public such concepts as Metro-sexuality. Singletons and Globesity She brings to her presentations more than a decade’s worth of experience as a consumer researcher and trend analyst as well as a reputation as one of the world’s leading futurists. Marian not only delivers practical insights, but she also offers audiences an accurate glimpse of the near future.[/expand]

[expand title=”How she presents”]Her powerful presentations are well prepared and entertaining.[/expand]
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Guru of Personal Reinvention

Watt Nicoll MP is a coach and motivator extraordinaire.

He insists on MP after his name as a public declaration of being a Motivated Person.

Motivator for the Everton Football team, he has helped take them from relegation candidates to a top 6 team in his first season.

He has developed a process of self-education and awareness, which has distinguished him as a world-class resource for the development of human potential

Innovator of developing human potential

[expand title=”In detail”] In his pursuit of excellence, he is a regular contributor to BBC Radio and subject of a BBC2 Television documentary. Also, he is a board member of Young Enterprise Scotland.

His programmes are built on the basis that successful organisations share an ability to engage high performance people within their organisations.[/expand]

[expand title=”What he offers you”]Shake off mediocrity and live up to your potential by taking advantage of his non-traditional training techniques.

Discover how to release untapped energy and creativity of existing personnel to uphold success and profitability.[/expand]
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Leading Authority in the field of Creative, Conceptual Thinking

Edward de Bono is widely regarded as the leading authority in the field of creative thinking, innovation and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill. He is the originator of the term Lateral Thinking which has an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary and he is equally renowned for his development of the Six Thinking Hats technique and the Direct Attention Thinking Tools (D.A.T.T) framework.

“Implementing creativity should double the profits of any company within 5 years ”
Dr Edward de Bono has been ranked among the top 50 most influential business thinkers. In 2009 Thinkers 50, the global ranking of management gurus, placed him among the list of most influential thinkers.

[expand title=”In detail”] He was the Chairman of the Council of Young Enterprise Europe which had a membership of 1,500,000 youngsters across Europe, Israel and Russia who set up mini-businesses whilst at school. He also established the World Centre for New Thinking which acts as a platform and channel to make visible New Thinking from any source.[/expand]

[expand title=”What he offers you”]The main appeal of Edward’s work is its simplicity and practicality. His instructions in thinking have been sought by governments and corporations worldwide while his programmes for the teaching of thinking in schools are mandatory in some countries. He teaches his audiences that you can solve problems not by removing the cause, but by designing the way forward, even if the cause remains in place.[/expand]
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Founder of the Third World Centre for Water Management

Prof. Asit Biswas is the founder of the Third World Centre for Water Management in Mexico. Under his dynamic leadership, the centre has established a unique international identity in pursuing cutting-edge research. In 2006 he received the Stockholm Water Prize for his outstanding contributions to global water resource issues. Prof. Biswas has been Editor-in-Chief the International Journal of Water Resources Development for the past 21 years.

He has added new dimensions to the wise use of the global water resources.

[expand title=”In detail”] Prof. Biswas acted as a Senior Advisor to Mr. Yehia Abdel Mageed, Secretary General of the UN Water Conference. During 1980-81, he was a Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He spent 1981-1997 in Oxford, U.K. pursuing his research interests and advising governments and international organisations, he travels around the globe 10 months out of the year. [/expand]

[expand title=”What he offers you”]With world-class research and focusing on out-of-the-box thinking, Prof Biswas offers audiences new and innovative ideas in the world of water management. He has been an advisor to six heads of the United Nations Agencies, most major bilateral and multilateral aid organisations and 17 national governments.[/expand]
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Director, screenwriter, composer and actor,

Pedro Almodovar is the most celebrated Spanish diretor since Luis Bunuel and Carlos Saura. He was born in La Mancha, Spain in 1951.

At the age of 16, he moved to Madrid, alone without either his family or any money in his pocket. He had decided to study and make films. It was impossible to enter the Official film School as Franco had recently closed it. He worked in multiple and sporadic jobs but he couldn’t afford to buy his first Super-8 camera until he took a “serious” job with the National Telephone Company where he worked for 12 years as an administrative assistant. These years were in a sense, his real education. He was in touch with a social class which he would probably not have mixed with in other circumstances; the middle class Spanish family at the beginning of the age consumerism. He joined the independent theatre group “Loss Gollardos” and made Super 8 movies. He wrote for several underground magazines and also short stories, some of which were published. His luck was that the opening of his first feature film coinicided with the birth of Spanish democracy in Spain.

[expand title=”In detail”] In 1980 he launched his first feature “Pepi, Lunci, Bom … “. Since then, the world of film has become second nature to him. He writes, directs and invents stories which are alive – his films are shown all over the world.

His films include “Labyrinth of Passion”, “Dark Habits”, “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”, “Matador”, “Law of Desire” , “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (which was nominated for an Academy Award as best Foreign Language Film), “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!”

Pedro Almodovar is the recipient of numerous awards including the Glauber Rocha Award for Best Director, Rio Film Festival and LA Film Critics Association “New Generation” Award. However, this year he has taken the industry by storm with the Goya winning movie “All About My Mother”. The film also took two awards at the European Film Awards in 1999 – best European Film of the Year and best European Director in addition to best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.[/expand]
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Former Formula 1 World Champion

Damon Hill is a British former racing driver from England. He was the 1996 Formula One World Champion and is the son of the late double Formula One world champion Graham Hill, and is the only son of a world champion to win the title. He retired from the sport at the end of the 1999 season, after 122 race starts. In 2006, Damon Hill became president of the British Racing Drivers’ Club, succeeding Jackie Stewart.

“A living F1 legend”

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