The Unlock Moment: The Inner Shift That Changes How You Lead

He’s been called the world’s number one CEO coach, with a client list that includes Richard Branson and Steve Jobs. What fewer people know is that Mark Thompson struggled all the way through school, with a learning and eyesight difficulty that made traditional education hard, and it took him years to understand why that mattered. Mark has coached the CEOs and founders of Pinterest, Lyft, Fitbit an...

There’s a particular kind of certainty that comes from a traditional career. You have the training, the title, you know what good looks like. Starting a business feels like stepping off solid ground onto a rollercoaster you’re still building as it moves.   Recorded live at Climb 26, this is a conversation with Eve Hanks, founder and CEO of veterinary diagnostics company MI:RNA. Eve spent year...

How do you stay ahead of the curve when you’ve been surfing the wave for 40 years?   Recorded live at Climb 26 as Andy Wood received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award, this is a conversation with a man who has been present at the exact moment new ideas became whole new industries ... from the early days of the UK games industry, through computer vision and digital humans, to the AI too...

Most great things don’t start with a perfect plan. They start with a moment.   Recorded live at Climb 26, this is the story of how Tayo Adebisi turned a £5,000 investment into a business turning over £5 million. Tayo didn’t come from retail, or business, or money. She came to e-commerce at rock bottom, needing something to pull her forward, and she began with a single secondhand ukulele that...

As a boy, Jamie Ramsden sat at the foot of the tallest rollercoaster in Europe, too afraid of heights to get on - until he realised the fear was something he’d built himself. That moment became the idea his whole career rests on: most of the limits we run into are self-imposed, not structural.    Jamie is an award-winning former CEO, an executive coach, and the author of Let’s Go: How Gr...

Jennifer McCollum spent twenty-five years climbing toward a seat she wasn't sure she'd ever reach. Then a single phone call changed everything by telling her exactly what she didn't want.   Jennifer is President and CEO of Catalyst, the global nonprofit working with many of the world's most powerful companies to build workplaces that work for women, and only the sixth leader in its sixty-year...

Some leaders sense change early. Far fewer know what to do with it. Rita McGrath has spent her career studying the moment the ground shifts under a business ... and why so many brilliant, well-resourced companies miss it completely. She's a professor at Columbia Business School, ranked among the world's top ten management thinkers by Thinkers50 and winner of their number one award in strategy, and...

Every day, most of us drive around the car park of our own brain looking for the closest possible space ... the easiest answer, the fastest shortcut, the machine that will do the thinking for us. Mohan Nair thinks that habit is costing us something we haven't begun to measure.   Mohan is a speaker, author and transformation leader who has spent decades working at the intersection of business,...

Close to half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants. Eighty per cent of billion-dollar startups have an immigrant founder or executive. And businesses founded by immigrants statistically outlast the ones founded by everybody else.   Nobody had properly asked why ... until Dr Neri Karra Sillaman did.   Neri stood at a border at the age of eleven with her nine-year-old brother and her...

What do you do when the life you've spent everything building is suddenly taken away from you overnight? Stephanie Millward MBE was 16, a British record-breaking swimmer heading for the Sydney Olympics, when she went blind, lost the ability to walk and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Doctors gave her 10 years to live.   She's now 44.   In this episode, Stephanie takes me through one of the...

Some of the most powerful shifts in leadership come from seeing something that's been there all along, but never fully acted on.   On this episode of The Unlock Moment, I am joined by Christine Barnes, executive coach, UC Berkeley lecturer, and author of Inclusionable: Transform How You Lead and Elevate Your Team's Performance ... and her story is a brilliant example of exactly that.   Christine h...

Chris Whitaker has spent his life navigating systems that weren’t built with him in mind … and then choosing to change them.   Born six weeks prematurely with cerebral palsy, Chris grew up learning how to operate in a world that often underestimated him. That early experience only served to sharpen his ambition. From university rowing squads to national-level sport, and later into leadership roles...

What does it take to perform when there is no second take … and no margin for error?   In this episode, I speak with Luisa Baldini - former BBC correspondent and co-founder of Composure Media - about what it takes to communicate under pressure.   For over two decades, Luisa reported live from major global events, often with millions watching, producers speaking in her ear, and events unfolding in...

Some negotiations are lost long before a single word is agreed. They’re lost in the rush to fill silence … in the instinct to ease tension … in the urge to make the other person comfortable.   My guest in this episode understands this better than most. Mildred Yuan is a leading talent agent, negotiator and executive coach - and she also happens to be my partner in life. Years ago she was my dance...

What happens when a relationship doesn’t explode … it just disappears?   In this episode of The Unlock Moment, I’m joined by high-profile US psychologist Dr Josh Coleman to unpack why estrangement happens - and what actually helps when you want to rebuild a relationship that’s been lost to distance, conflict, or silence.   We explore the major pathways to estrangement (including cultural change, d...

What happens when success comes at the cost of authenticity?   In this episode of The Unlock Moment, I’m joined by Dr Michelle K. Johnston - Distinguished Professor of Management, executive coach, and co-author with Marshall Goldsmith - to explore the moment that reshaped her leadership, her research, and her life.   At just 28, Michelle was a rising academic star. But sitting alone in her office,...

What does it take to stay human in a system that rewards slogans over thinking?   In this conversation, Ryan Wain - Senior Director of Policy & Politics at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change - traces his path from Sainsbury’s checkouts in Liverpool to shaping ideas that influence governments in the UK and around the world.   We talk about the leadership lessons he learned from everyday peo...

What happens when you get everything you thought you wanted, and it still doesn’t feel like enough?   For Paul Ollinger, that question surfaced after leaving Facebook with financial freedom in his early forties. On paper, it was success. In reality, it sparked a deeper reckoning about identity, purpose, and what actually makes a life feel whole.   In this conversation, Paul reflects on the disorie...

Some leadership lessons arrive through strategy. Others arrive at 38,000 feet, reading a single sentence that reframes everything.   For Garry Ridge, former CEO and Chairman Emeritus of WD-40, that moment sparked a radical shift in how he thought about leadership, culture, and responsibility. In his second appearance on The Unlock Moment, Garry returns to reflect on what he’s learned since steppin...

Recorded live at Climb25 - The UK’s Festival of Business Growth & Innovation, this episode of The Unlock Moment features Dr Bob Gomersall: physicist, teacher, accidental entrepreneur and pioneer of global educational technology.   Bob traces his journey from teaching physics in the late 1970s to building a business delivering assessment platforms now used around the world, supporting awarding bodi...

Some unlock moments arrive quietly. Others come when life is in full conflict.   For executive coach and conflict mediator Adam Vane, clarity appeared only after he walked away from the family business and into years of intense Zen training. Alone on a mountaintop retreat, he realised a truth that changed everything: “Nobody’s going to help me figure this out… it’s just little me.”   That moment b...

Some moments don’t arrive gently. They shake you awake and force you to see the world differently.   For Professor Arad Reisberg, that clarity began in childhood, sitting on “whites only” benches in apartheid-era South Africa and feeling, long before he had language for it, that something was deeply wrong. Growing up openly gay, Jewish and a migrant, he learned early what it meant to move through...

Some lessons in leadership come from success. Others come from failure ... and the courage to own it.   For Tim Lupinacci, Chairman and CEO of Baker Donelson, one of America’s leading law firms, his Unlock Moment came early in his career - a late night in the office, a costly mistake, and a boss who unexpectedly saw potential instead of failure. That moment changed everything, sparking a lifelong...

In a time when companies talk about culture but struggle to live it, one truth stands out: culture doesn’t happen by accident … it happens by design.   Father and daughter James and Krista White have spent their careers on opposite ends of the leadership spectrum - James in the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, Krista in the world of purpose-driven strategy and social impact. Together, they’ve...

In a world that celebrates networking, collecting contacts and trading favours, we often overlook a more meaningful truth: real connection isn’t built through transactions … it’s built through generosity, trust and shared purpose.   David Homan understands this deeply. A classical composer, CEO and author of Orchestrating Connection, he is known as a “connector of connectors”, bringing remarkable...