Andre de Wit is a motivational and experienced speaker, regarded for the combination of global successful operational leadership experience and strategic human resource experience in leading international companies.  

On the speaker’s platform, he is engaging and passionate. His blend of power and warmth, as well as knowledge and instinct, translates into messages that are informative, entertaining, and practical. Because of his wide experience as a facilitator and speaker, he is able to build interactivity with the audience quickly.

Currently, Andre is the dean of Leadership Academy Amsterdam, an organisation specialised in creating leadership interventions for organisations in turbulent environments. As a CEO within IKEA and the Metro Group, Andre gained more than 20 years’ leadership experience with large corporate organisations. During his time as vice president of learning in the Metro Group and Carlsberg Group, he was involved in the design and implementation of leadership interventions from the perspective of learning.   

The topics Andre speaks about in conferences are the relationship between the changing world (10-20 years’ perspective) and the demands this will have on future leadership. He will share within his area of expertise the ways these future demands on leadership can be included in a leadership development strategy. The latest practical example is the “Learning Leaders Program” that he developed and implemented for the Carlsberg Group.

Kevin is a Learning & Development detective and just like Sherlock Holmes, he solves mysteries. The mystery he solves is, “Did training work?”. He uses facts, evidence and data to show training and learning’s impact on behaviour, per­formance and goals. Kevin measures efficiency, effectiveness and outcomes for training and learning. His work is firmly rooted in his belief that training, learning and talent development has the power to impact behaviour, thought and skill. His greatest capability is producing fact-based evidence for the impact of train­ing and learning. Kevin’s experience is global and multi-industry. He’s served in a variety of roles across training, learning and talent development which guides and informs his perspective and actions. Kevin’s guiding principle is, “Find one thing about a person’s behaviour or performance you can attribute to training or learning and let that lead to the facts about impact.”

Donatella de Vita graduated in philosophy from the State University of Milan in the mid-80s, later obtaining a PhD in work psychology. She subsequently worked in the areas of selection and management training for the La Rinascente Group and Deutsche Bank Italy. In 1990, she joined the Pirelli Group, where she has run international projects in training, development and internal communications. In 2000, she took different global positions as head of the HR department of various business units and affiliates at international level. At the beginning of 2011 she took on group-wide responsibility for learning, engagement and welfare, and in 2018 she also started leading talent development and performance management global processes. Over the years, Donatella has published various articles and papers on learning and development experiences and methodologies and for various years held a regular teaching position at Milano Bicocca University within the pedagogy department. Since 2015, she has been a member of the EFMD EQUIS and EPAS accreditation global organisation.

Patrick Veenhoff is an accomplished, results-driven, multilingual corporate learn­ing and development director highly regarded for profoundly impacting business performance through the design and deployment of learning experience archi­tectures for the reform, enhancement and advancement of organisational goals and objectives. Patrick spearheaded innovative, disruptive, digitalised and agile approaches in corporate learning and development to enable stellar professional skill development of 5,000 employees by transforming to a collaborative learning organisation and initiating the transformation of L&D at group level (14,000 em­ployees). He increased learner engagement from 200 to nearly 900 active learn­ers per month, enabled employee-generated content production of 200 trainings and increased L&D NPS by 10% all within 12 months through data analytics, customer-centric L&D architecture and experience design.

Jerry Pico is a strategic learning, leadership and talent management executive who is passionate about developing people and the organisational capabilities to support them. He has led numerous culture change initiatives in three global or­ganisations over the past seven years, and authored a course on culture change for Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning in 2018. Jerry has 20 years of international con­sulting and in-house experience in the US, Germany and Switzerland with many industry leaders: Allianz, Ernst & Young, Korn/Ferry, Google, ABB and Swarovski. He enjoys exchanging ideas with his peers by presenting at professional confer­ences, and through a professional association he founded in Munich. He com­pleted his master’s degree in HR and organisation development at the University of San Francisco, and is certified in several methods of coaching and facilitation. Jerry lives with his wife and son in Munich, where he works as the director of HR development for Daiichi Sankyo Europe.

Leah Langheim is the global human resource associate director for innovation and talent strategy. Recently, Leah has been focussed on leading the creation of critical talent strategies and actions for business themes in the “NEW” across all Accenture business globally, as well as on intelligent platform services, Accen­ture’s innovation architecture and Industry X.O! Accenture solves their clients’ toughest challenges by providing unmatched services in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Accenture partners with more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500, driving innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. With expertise across more than 40 industries, more than 460,000 employees and all business functions, Accenture delivers transforma­tional outcomes for a demanding new digital world. Before her current role, Leah spent four years as the senior HR business partner for the technology business in Europe, Africa and Latin America with more than 44,000 employ­ees across all countries. Leah is a senior HR leader with more than 18 years of experience in multiple local, area and global HR leadership roles within Ac­centure. She worked and lived for three years (2012-2015) as an expat Ma­nila/ Philippines leading a transformational talent program which enabled the growth from 30,000 to 50,000 employees in the Philippines. Leah lives cur­rently close to Frankfurt, Germany. She studied business administration at the University of Mannheim and for 14 years has been teaching HR at the Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg (Corporate State University) Mannheim for International Management for Business and Information Technology.

David Gezzele studied communication sciences and pedagogy at the University of Vienna. Since 2016, he has been in charge of L&D at Erste Bank Austria and Erste Group Bank, and his team is responsible for more than 6,000 employees and their development. The massive changes in financial services and the associ­ated effects on leadership and culture are the focus of his current activities. Cou­rageously breaking new ground is more important than ever today. The tension between new trends, change due to digitalisation and the demand for stability and reliability as a business partner is a daily challenge. So he relies on the inno­vative strength and agility of his team, with the clear aim of ensuring measurable added value for the company and its future success. And finally: always being a small step ahead.

Sam Zalcman is a passionate and creative L&D professional, currently leading global initiatives at Philip Morris International (PMI) to inspire a new culture of learning. Most of Sam’s current projects blend digital learning with social media engagement with the aim of shifting the perception of what learning, sharing and collaboration really mean. PMI has embarked on a comprehensive transformation that demands the development of new skills and the adoption of new ways of working – this results in an environment that requires experimentation, humility and a healthy appetite for risk. Sam believes in the importance of creating engag­ing and immersive learning experiences as well as leveraging experiential design to enable employees to quickly translate new ideas and concepts into tangible business decisions and improve performance. Prior to working at PMI, he was a consultant designing, developing and delivering management development pro­grams for Fortune Global 500 clients in the consumer goods, pharmaceutical and technology sectors.

Passionate about innovation, Anne-Sophie Gimenez builds her projects with an entrepreneurial spirit, a social heart and a humanist soul. She started as an international consultant in 2000, then became a manager and intrapreneur at Or­ange, where she created the Orange Learning Agency, a team of digital learning consultants and designers who develop global learning experiences for Orange employees. She now focusses on learning as a factor of business and human developments. That’s why she created WIDID: What I Do, I understanD, the first immersive learning platform dedicated to soft skills.

Rob J.H. Veersma, born in 1955, is the director of training and development at Gazprom International in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is responsible for imple­menting international training programmes for Gazprom, aligned with the com­petence management system and tailored to local needs. He creates integrated accelerated learning experiences for the assigned population and integrate learn­ing into the community. He applies organisational effectiveness experiences to enable business performance improvement. He was previously working for Shell International and amongst others he was the commercial academy global learn­ing director. In that role he was responsible for all aspects of global capability building that enables world-class deal making. Over the course of his 25-plus years of experience he has focussed on global onboarding, virtual working, leadership development and portfolio management. He has published often and given many public speeches on, among others, performance improvement, just-in-time-learning, learning and ethics, virtual working and ROI of learning.

After becoming infatuated with new technologies very young, with time Aurore Thion specialised in the fields of immersive learning and gamification. A digital learning expert, she worked as an independent and in big compagnies (phar­maceutical industry, telco, automotive industry). At Orange, she was head of learning experiences design and production. Her passion: using new technologies to offer innovative and addictive training; thus she created WIDID: What I Do, I understanD, the first
immersive learning platform dedicated to soft skills.

Stephan Kasulke became chief learning officer of Deutsche Telekom in December 2017. Previously, he ran the Zero Outage program in T-Systems International from 2012-2017, reducing the IT outages for all customers of T-Systems by 95 percent and boosting customer satisfaction from a market average level in 2012 to an IT industry leader in 2017. As a teenager in 1985, Stephan started as an independent software developer for some regional companies in Westphalia/ Germany. In 1995, he developed sales IT applications for Deutsche Leasing AG, Bad Homburg, and in 2001 he was responsible for IT infrastructure and architec­ture of Deutsche Leasing. In 2004, Stephan joined GE Capital acting in several management positions. In 2007, he became CIO of GE Money Deutschland. From 2009-12, Stephan worked as managing director of IT at Erste Group Bank in Vienna, Austria. He received an MBA at the University of Maryland, USA.

Ashok Maharaj has a master’s and PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology (USA). He was the Guggenheim Fellow with the National Air and Space, Smith­sonian Institution, Washington D.C. (2010-11) and also worked on a research project for NASA to write about NASA’s Global Ventures. He is heading the XR Lab for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India. Over the last seven years he has worked extensively on digital learning ecologies leveraging AR/VR/MR.

Sharon Olivier teaches, researches and consults in career/competencies architec­ture; strategic HR; leading in the 21st Century, ego/ecosystem leadership, team engagement, polarity management and personal resilience. Before Ashridge, she spent 20 years as a senior manager/OD consultant/learning facilitator/coach/ speaker. She started her career as an HR manager in the motor industry, then led human capacity building in a large consulting company, after which she estab­lished a successful consulting practice in South Africa. Sharon holds a master’s in industrial psychology and a management advanced programme certificate. She is a master practitioner in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and a psychoneuro­immunology practitioner (PNI).

As a seasoned business professional with over 30 years of both experience and exposure in retails, logistics and finance/insurance, these days Thomas Schli­chting holds responsibilities for sales training at UPS Capital in Europe. His cur­rent role entails facets of talent scouting, recruiting, on-boarding, training and developing people at levels from trainee/business rookie to senior staff mem­bers. Thomas holds a degree in economics from Universities of Applied Sciences Nuremberg and Bochum, Germany, and has acquired business insight and devel­oped expertise in a wide array of disciplines, ranging from sales, sales training and development, events and sponsoring, through marketing and communica­tions/PR. With a total tenure of almost 30 years at UPS, Thomas had spent the vast majority of his career serving in various roles to support growth and welfare of the core business, always with international scope and operating out of ei­ther the German or the European HQs. In 2015, he moved over to UPS Capital, initially as talent development manager for Europe and Asia. In between, he as­sumed responsibility for HR, too. As of 2019, the focus is on sales to reflect both market changes and strategic expansion for the business unit on this continent. As much as Thomas is passionate about his profession, he loves and devotes as much attention to his wife Andrea and his five children ranging from 3 to 29. In addition, he is known as a mountaineer and outdoor enthusiast, with an affinity for motorsports and automotive, too.