Holly Ransom

Leadership is a mindset. Empower your people to harness purpose as a personal and collective motivator. Empower your teams to expand their sphere of influence, hone their risk appetite, and reframe their role in greater business success. As Gandhi put it, let’s teach your people to do what they can, with what they have, from where they are. Starting today.

• Purpose: Knowing your why is one thing, knowing their why is everything.
• Risk: Pre-mortems, black boxes, asking the questions without answers. Build your ability to bounce back from failure while looking risk in the eye.
• Make your mind up: Framing your choices and diversifying your dice in the age of etoxic information.
• Find your edge, own your narrative: No one does you, like you. Be your difference – it’s your most valuable asset.

Research has shown, persistently for two decades, that 90% of companies fail to execute their strategy due to poor execution, and McKinsey data tells us that 70 percent of organisational change efforts fall short of desired results. Against the backdrop of a world and business landscape that is changing at a greater velocity than ever before, we need to continually evolve the way that we work and lead so we can continue to achieve excellence.

This talk will explore best practice on leading change and executing ideas. Specifically, this presentation will focus on empowering leaders to be able to build their own change roadmap- from framing the messaging and building cultural momentum around ideas, to approaches to ensure ideas get executed.

Esports is one of the fastest growing entertainment markets, expected to rise to $1.5 billion market by 2020 with 303 million annual viewers; Gamers devote a collective 156 billion hours a week gaming and spend $23.5 billion for the privilege of doing so; and 2.85 billion people are using social media, with $31 billion currently being spent every year to try and grab their attention on the social platforms.

These three phenomena are profoundly shaping psychology, communication and commerce, and leaders who want to understand the future of consumer expectations, fan experience, commercial partnerships and customer interaction need to open their minds to the next frontier that leaders across these three industries are pushing for. Additionally, for community leaders, teachers and employers this talk will examine the inextricable link between these three phenomena and mental health, connection and community.

What does leadership look like today, when we’re facing complexity and challenges in every direction? Activate a distributed leadership model with the methods to help people operate out of their comfort zone, model inclusive culture, and sharpen their critical curiosity for the unknown.

• Energy over time: As we build our stamina for change, managing energy rather than time becomes crucial.
• Leading at the cutting edge: Getting comfortable being uncomfortable and starting before you’re ready with the “yes, and” improvisation method.
• Critical curiosity: When opinions are currency and fake news is everywhere, how can we train ourselves to do the work required to hold an opinion?
• Design for inclusion: Moving from polarisation to progress.

We live in a communication age, and we’ve got to be able to engage effectively in that environment; record short attention spans, a saturated and noisy landscape and an increasingly sophisticated audience. However, According to an HBR study, 91% of employees say their leaders’ communication style limits the effectiveness of their leadership, and the Independent Directors Council research says miscommunication costs business $62 million annually.

This presentation is centred on building the communication toolkit of the leaders in the room through storytelling, psychology and engagement theory. We’ll unpack the techniques of some of the world’s leading communicators, get our heads around effective change theory and empower the leaders in the room to position messages in a way that builds cultural momentum around their ideas.

We spend around $14 billion annually on leadership development programs and yet, as a Boston Consulting Group report highlighted, because these programs aren’t building competencies that are linked to core, relevant business outcomes, a lot of that investment is wasted. Additionally, while we might have ditched roadmaps for Google maps, but when it comes to work and leadership, we’re still teaching, and relying on, a 20th-century handbook- that’s proving ineffectual in the face of present-
day challenges.

This talk is all about evolving leadership thinking and development for the present-day reality. Over the course of this presentation, we’ll examine the core development fundamentals necessary to be a leader of impact, unpacking the three core areas of mindset, method and mastery. Topics explored include ‘dilemma flipping’, ‘extreme listening’, ‘habit hacking’, ‘readiness discipline’ and ‘getting comfortable being uncomfortable’, and the audience will be exposed to case studies from how these
techniques and approaches are being employed by leading-edge individuals and organisations.

The mastery of leadership lies within unlearning as quickly as we learn, thinking collectively and acting in the moment backed with the discipline of
reparation and planning. How do we help our leaders sustain their own energy as well as momentum for change?

• Unlearn, learn and relearn: growing others to grow ourselves when leadership requires a circular growth mindset.
• Build your tribe: Inspire and empower followership to scale systemic change.
• Preparation discipline: Get your goals in place and know when to get out or your own way.
• Sustainable momentum: Bio empathy and the ability to work ‘on’ and ‘in’.

Millennials comprise 37% of the Australian workforce but will occupy near 75% of it by 2025, yet currently 6 out of 10 are disengaged, costing about $20 billion annually. From a consumer standpoint, millennials have a current spending power of US $10 trillion and will control 28% of the world’s financial assets by 2030 as more than $59 trillion worth of wealth transfers between generations.

This talk will examine the driving forces behind this emerging generation: what motivates and engages them, and what leads them to make a purchase, become a brand advocate and develop brand or employer loyalty. Importantly, this talk will deal with key intergenerational differences and tensions: feedback, expectations, communication and key decision-making factors; allowing leaders to understand the subtle but significant changes they can make to drive greater employee and customer outcomes.

Trust is the social glue that holds our institutions, businesses, media and societies together but it’s under an unprecedented attack- with trust hitting an all-time low. But this isn't the age of distrust - far from it. A new world order is emerging; who and how we trust is shifting, dramatically and quickly, and we’re moving to an age of distributed trust where reputation has never mattered more. It’s critical for leaders to understand how to remain effective in this new landscape and to be aware of trusts role in human relationships, innovation and society.

Holly examines the change in the ‘trust landscape’ and the adaptions businesses need to make to position for a competitive advantage. This talk will unpack three core components of any trust equation: how has it broken; what can we do to build it; and what can we do to rebuild it when it’s dented? Examining companies and organizations who’ve successfully adapted to the new trust landscape, and examining the role of technology, robots and algorithms in our evolving trust conversation.

At the present rate of change 75% of the SAP 500 incumbents will disappear by 2027- with the rate of change and volume of new market entrants, it’s never been harder to remain at the top for an extended period. We have extensive data points (from workforce engagement falling, to skill relevancy declining and trust bottoming out) but we’ll still be relying on leadership approaches that ‘are the way we’ve always done it’. We need a new approach to mindset, method and mastery that’s geared for the reality of the 21st-century organisations and all their challenges.

A great talk to be paired with ‘Leadership is an Inside Job’, this presentation builds on those individual leadership traits to focus on the building blocks of high performance and the role of leaders seeking to inspire, interact and execute in a way that delivers high-performing and sustainable outcomes. This
presentation will cover off topics such as ‘leading for effectiveness, not efficiency’, ‘constructive depolarisation’, ‘rapid prototyping’, ‘smart mob organising and ‘informing for influence’, and we’ll delve into the way leading organisations are applying these techniques to achieve extraordinary outcomes.