John Amaechi Psychology Consultant, CEO, Best-Selling NYT Author, Named by HR Magazine as one of HR's Most Influential Thinkers

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Select Keynotes

  • The Promise of Leadership
  • The Genie is Out of the Bottle - Leadership in the New World of Work
  • Rethinking Change as a Shared Mindset Rather Than as a Logistical Process
  • More Chance of Being Hit by a Meteor
  • How to Create and Sustain High-Performing Teams
  • Psychological Safety as a Prerequisite for Innovation
  • How Colleagues and Leaders Can Sustain an Environment of Trust
  • The Future is Human: The Impact of Technology and Integration of New Generations on the Face of 21st Century Leadership
  • Building a Workplace Where Meeting the Ultimate Challenges and Thriving are Not a Zero-Sum Game
  • Understanding Increasingly Prevalent Generational Differences and Implications for Organisations and Leaders

Select Book Titles

  • 2021 The Promises of Giants
  • 2007 Man in the Middle

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John Amaechi OBE is an organisational psychologist, Professor of Leadership at the University of Exeter Business School, and founder of APS Intelligence Ltd, a consultancy that helps large, complex organisations build high performing, ethical cultures. His work is grounded in behavioural science rather than inspiration alone, and his central argument, that culture is defined by the worst behaviour an organisation tolerates, has been credited by Wharton's Adam Grant as reshaping how leaders think about where culture actually comes from.

For sixteen years John has advised boards and senior leadership teams across Europe, APAC and the Americas, working across public and private sector organisations, educational institutions and governments in the UK, mainland Europe and the United States. That range gives him a genuinely cross-cultural, intergenerational read on leadership, and clients consistently note his directness: he tells senior teams what other advisers will not, in a way they can hear and act on.

John has been a non-executive director of a FTSE 250 light manufacturing company and spent a decade on the board of the largest acute hospital trust in the UK.

He is the author of three books on leadership, including the Sunday Times bestseller The Promises of Giants and his most recent work, It's Not Magic, The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders, both built on the premise that the behaviours which distinguish exceptional leaders are learnable and practicable rather than innate.

Before any of this, John completed his graduate training in psychology while playing professional basketball in the NBA, becoming the first British person to reach that level of the sport. It is a genuinely improbable start to a career, and it shows up in his work not as a motivational anecdote but as first-hand evidence for the point he makes most often: that exceptional performance is built through deliberate practice and the right conditions, not talent or luck alone.

John holds an OBE for services to sport and the voluntary sector, and works with clients through a combination of executive coaching, senior team facilitation and keynote engagements, always translating research-based solutions into language a room can actually act on.

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