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What if everything you know about leadership is wrong?
A rapid-fire tour of management theory, motivational nonsense and the one thing that actually works
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Forty years of academic research. Thousands of frameworks. Millions of words. Thousands of consultants. The answer was always: think clearly, stay curious, don’t be an idiot.
This talk is a high-speed, deliberately irreverent tour of the ideas that have shaped the way we think about leadership. Servant leadership. Psychological safety. VUCA. Agile. The matrix organisation. Each one is examined with genuine respect and absolutely no mercy.
Along the way, we meet the four leadership archetypes identified in a rigorous study published in an American journal that nobody reads. You will recognise yourself in one of them immediately and defend your type in the bar afterwards.
The outliers are more interesting. The ones who actually move the needle don't fit any archetype. They read the room. They change their mind when the evidence changes. They are comfortable not knowing. In an earlier age we called this common sense.
By the end, the audience will have laughed, winced, nodded — and arrived somewhere they probably already knew but needed permission to say out loud.
A clear head. An open mind. The basic decency to treat people as if they matter.
That’s it. The rest is keynote fees.
Best suited to: Senior leadership conferences, executive retreats, HR and learning and development forums, and any audience that has sat through one too many frameworks and is ready to hear someone say so. Format: Keynote (45–60 minutes) or conference opener/closer (30 minutes).
John Dore is a keynote speaker, executive educator and award-winning author whose work addresses one of the defining leadership challenges of our time: how to build organisations where talented people pull together — especially in an era defined by hybrid work, AI-driven disruption, and relentless change.
He is the creator of GLUE — a framework for cohesive leadership that transforms disconnected teams into high-performing organisations — and the author of GLUE: Transforming Leadership in a Hybrid World (Routledge, 2024), winner of Business Book of the Year in the Leadership category.
John spent nine years at London Business School, seven of them as Director of the Senior Executive Programme — the world's #1 FT-ranked open executive programme across 18 consecutive editions. In that role he worked with thousands of leaders from over 50 countries, designing and directing programmes that have shaped how major organisations think about leadership, culture and transformation. Before moving into executive education, he held senior leadership roles at Barclays and HSBC, giving him direct experience of leading at scale inside complex global organisations.
He now speaks and works independently, delivering keynotes and workshops for senior corporate audiences — typically Top 100 and C-suite leadership events — for clients including Grundfos, Arla Foods, Franke, HSBC and Quintet Private Bank. He is also a published novelist and optioned screenwriter, which perhaps explains why his audiences consistently describe him as a storyteller as much as a speaker.
John is based in the UK and available for engagements worldwide.
Keynote speaker, author and creator of GLUE — the leadership framework that builds the cohesion organisations need to thrive.
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