The Provocateurs

What if the biggest problem with marketing today is the way we’ve been taught to think about it? Samuel Monnie , once a “reformed marketer” but now “marketing reformer,” argues that traditional marketing frameworks like the 4Ps (product, price, place, promotion) no longer reflect the world we live in. Instead, we should look towards a more human model: purpose, people, progress, and prosperity. Pu...

What if the real purpose of business is not simply to make money, but to serve humanity? André Hoffmann is vice chairman of Roche Holding, co-founder of Intent , board member of the World Economic Forum, and co-author of The New Nature of Business: The Path to Prosperity and Sustainability . In this rich conversation with Thinkers50 CEO Mikko Leskelä and Kulleni Gebreyes, vice chair and US life sc...

Cécile Béliot is the first female CEO of Bel Group, known for iconic cheese brands The Laughing Cow, Babybel, and Boursin, as well as GoGo squeeZ fruit pouches. As only the second executive from outside the founding family to lead the 150-year-old company, she shares how she’s honoring legacy while driving transformation in today’s challenging environment – proving that companies can deliver both...

Frances Frei: Why Speed Doesn't Have to Break Things Frances Frei is a professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School and, together with her partner Anne Morriss , is the bestselling author of Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business ; Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You ; and Mov...

Dan Pink: Why Leaders Keep Getting Motivation Wrong (and How to Fix It) Daniel Pink is one of the world's foremost authorities on work motivation and human behavior. His seven best-selling books include Drive , To Sell Is Human , When , The Power of Regret , and A Whole New Mind . Recorded in London’s historic Guildhall during the Thinkers50 London Summit & Awards Gala in November 2025, t...

Steve Goldbach, Geoff Tuff, and Kulleni Gebreyes of Deloitte join Stuart Crainer and Des Dearlove of Thinkers50 to reflect on their highlights and insights from the 2025 Provocateurs series. Featuring in-depth conversations with leaders and innovators, the 2025 Provocateurs explored pressing topics from sustainability and space exploration to digital health, public policy, and food systems innovat...

In this Provocateurs podcast special recorded at the 2025 Thinkers50 London Summit & Awards Gala , creativity strategist Natalie Nixon discusses how organizations can harness creativity as a strategic business competency. Challenging the misconception that creativity belongs only to artists, Natalie uses her “wonder-rigor” framework to demonstrate that the best engineers, scientists, CFOs, and...

Anke Hampel: Recorded Live at Climate Week New York Anke Hampel is chief sustainability officer at ABB , a global technology leader in electrification and automation based in Zurich, and a member of the board of directors of ABB Germany. With a background in finance, procurement, supply chain, and innovation management in the consumer goods and packaging industry, Anke is driven by a mission to un...

Award-winning chef, chocolatier, and founder of Midunu , Selassie Atadika is a Time 2025 Earth Award honoree and Yale’s inaugural Global Table Fellow . In this compelling episode of Provocateurs, Selassie demonstrates how intentional food choices can reshape entire systems. Food is more than just sustenance, she contends, it’s a powerful tool for transformation, touching every aspect of our lives...

Eileen Collins: The First Female Space Commander Trailblazer Eileen Collins is a retired NASA astronaut and former Air Force Colonel. In 1995, she became the first woman to pilot a space shuttle and in 1999, she became the first woman to command a space shuttle mission. Eileen's final mission in 2005 was commanding the critical return to flight mission, the first since the space shuttle Colum...

Leading in the Age of Outrage Karthik Ramanna is a professor of business and public policy at the University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government and author of The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World – recently named one of Thinkers50's Best Management Books of 2025 . In this episode of The Provocateurs, Karthik identifies three distinctive forces shaping our current m...

Rajendra Pratap Gupta is a policymaker and author, a former advisor to the Health Minister of India, and a leading provocateur in digital health initiatives across the world.  He is the founder of the Global Digital Health Summit, which aims to create the future of healthcare; global think-tank The Health Parliament, which collaborates with the world's leading organizations to make health and...

The economic case for climate-smart transformation Katie McGinty is the vice president and chief sustainability and external relations officer at Johnson Controls. In this episode she shares insights from her remarkable career spanning both public service – including as the first woman to chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality under President Clinton – and private sector leadership...

A sustainable systems scientist, Weslynne Ashton is professor of environmental management and sustainability at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she also co-directs ID’s Food Systems Action Lab. Here she discusses her work in industrial ecology and the circular economy, drawing from her experiences growing up in Trinidad. Weslynne argues that businesses need to adopt a more holistic vie...

The 2024 Provocateurs series featured nine inspiring thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and business authors who challenged us to re-think conventional approaches to leadership and management.  Neri Karra Sillaman shared her remarkable story from refugee to building a multi-million-dollar sustainable fashion brand; Marcus Collins explored the hidden power of cultural influence in consumer behaviour;...

Transforming Barbie Executive vice president and chief brand officer of Mattel, Lisa McKnight is credited with leading the transformation of the Barbie brand. Under her leadership, Barbie became the number one global toy property in 2020 and 2021, and she redefined Barbie’s global social mission with the launch of the Dream Gap Project in 2018, a multi-year initiative which has positively impacted...

Recorded Live at Climate Week, New York Paul Polman is a business leader, campaigner, and co-author (with Andrew Winston ) of Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive By Giving More Than They Take , a Financial Times Business Book of the Year. Together with Andrew, Paul is ranked #3 on the Thinkers50 Ranking . As CEO of Unilever (2009-2019), Paul demonstrated that business can profit through...

The Courage to be Net Positive Andrew Winston is one of the most widely read writers and thinkers on sustainable business. His books on sustainability strategy include Green to Gold, The Big Pivot , and most recently, Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take , which he co-authored with Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever. Andrew and Paul are ranked #3 in the Thin...

Atif Rafiq: Digital Disruptor Provocateur of the C-Suite, Atif Rafiq has been disrupting companies for more than 25 years in Silicon Valley, the Fortune 500, and through a variety of his own startups. Having begun his career in digital native companies including AOL, Yahoo, and Amazon, Atif was named the first chief digital officer in the history of the Fortune 500 when he took on that role for Mc...

Decoding the Power of Pressure How can we harness the positive powers of pressure? How can we mitigate the negative effects of pressure when the stakes are high? Dane Jensen is the CEO of Third Factor, an instructor at Queen’s University and the University of North Carolina, and author of The Power of Pressure . In this podcast with Deloitte’s Geoff Tuff and Thinkers50’s Stuart Crainer, he explain...

How to Tap into the Hidden Wisdom of the People Around You Why do people withhold information from each other? Why are some of the smartest, successful people the worst at learning from each other?  Jeff Wetzler is on a quest to transform learning opportunities, both in business and in education. If we want to create a workforce for the future, with skills that cannot be replaced by AI, he explain...

Neri Karra Sillaman: From Refugee to Fashion Revolutionary At age 11, Neri Karra Sillaman’s world was turned upside down when her Bulgarian-Turkish family was forced to flee their home country. Driven by a hunger for education and a better life, Neri grabbed an opportunity to study business management at the University of Miami, where she became interested in how businesses – in particular, busine...

Culture, Connections, and Community Marketer extraordinaire, Marcus Collins is a clinical professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. A former advertising executive who worked on iTunes + Nike sport music initiatives at Apple, Marcus contends that what we wear, what we eat, where we work, who we date, and just about every facet of our social living is informed by our underlyi...

Amy Chang: Becoming An AI Entrepreneur Amy Chang serves on the board of directors for The Walt Disney Company and Procter & Gamble, and has previously served on the boards of Cisco, Splunk, Marqeta, and Informatica. In 2018, Amy’s start-up business, Accompany, an AI/ML-based relationship intelligence platform serving Fortune 500 companies, was acquired by Cisco for $270 million. Post-acquisiti...

What did we learn from our provocateurs in 2023? Who provoked us to think again and act differently? Which stories remain with us? The Provocateurs podcast series gives you direct access to the ideas, experiences, and insights of remarkable leaders from around the world. In 2023, in collaboration with Deloitte, Thinkers50 hosted an inspiring mix of guests in thought-provoking conversations. The to...