Emilie Sydney-Smith
Keynote Speaker
Helping your people to align on proven ways to grow profits while improving lives
Keynote Topics
"Probably the best speaker I've seen in 4 years"
Designing billion dollar opportunities alongside AI
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How I easily created my startup in 1/10 the time and with better validation by using AI
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AI will create trillions of dollars of wealth - how to design opportunities for your organization or startup to capture some of that
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Practical tips on how to get started and what not to do
Audience: Entrepreneurs and mid to senior ranks of small to large companies
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Truly growing your company – we’ve been doing it the hard way
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Building or buying more of the same is not really growth if profit margins are dropping or the industry is about to be disrupted
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How to tell if your company is in that rut and how to jailbreak the company out of that destructive strategy, no matter your role
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Failsafe process for creating growth through new ventures with high profits, high impact that leverage your current talents
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How to create an ultra-productive, inspired, low-politics team culture at the same time with triple the talent retention
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Eureka moments: a different approach to cost cutting and productivity boosts in your current business
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Case studies from work with 30 of the world’s biggest companies
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Audience: Mid to senior ranks of medium to large companies
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Creating lucrative new startups or business lines (more targeted than the above topic)
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Failsafe process for creating growth through new ventures with high profits, high impact that leverage your current talents
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Case studies from work with 30 of the world’s biggest companies
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How do you make sure customers urgently desire your new products or services?
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How to create an ultra-productive, inspired, low-politics team culture at the same time with triple the talent retention
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Adopting groundbreaking technology that underpins success, rather than “shiny objects” no matter how tech savvy your company is now
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Accessing the world’s top experts in the business niche is easier than you think
Audience: Mid to senior ranks of medium to large companies
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Creating high performance teams with minimal politics
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Practical experience in helping people adore their work and team so much that they do the best work of their lives
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How to build deep trust and openness
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My one rule for my staff that almost guarantees good behaviour with no need for any other policy
Audience: Anyone on or leading teams
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Geopolitics: Preparing your operations for a dangerous world
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Is the world changing enough for you to care and prepare to be directly affected by war, cyberwar, or social mayhem?
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Where to start if you’ve never considered what such dangers would mean to you, your loved ones and organization
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Important lessons for everyone from running simulations of how companies could react to the threats, opportunities and wildcards for their operations
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How to find hope, camaraderie, strength, strategic skills and really valuable business ideas by running simulations ahead of time
Audience: Anyone in small to large business or government, including their Boards needing to learn about geopolitics
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Technophobes were right! Until now.
If you always doubted the value of tech and digitization for your work, it’s no wonder. Early tech rarely lives up to the hype. Most of it was adopted by well-meaning people with horrible outcomes. However, tech just matured to become user friendly, adaptable and to truly give you superpowers. It’s time to fall in love with tech, using the easy steps shared in this presentation.
Audience: non-IT professionals
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Enough hype about Generative AI. Here’s how to get its superpowers.
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Let’s stop getting distracted by the theory and focus on what matters for us users
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How to use Generative AI to get superpowers
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Case study: Fostering adoption while the cyber team wants everyone to stop using it
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“Data is the new gold” used to be laughable, but now it’s no joke
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Be the hero: how to get your organization’s data up to scratch no matter your job title
Audience: Anyone in small to large business or government
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The roadmap for making your IT systems pay off
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Give your people superpowers they love
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Pre and post Generative AI software and data assets and imperatives
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IT should not be a cost center - how to make it propel all your profit centers
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Bridging the needs of executives, IT, cyber security and data-creating and data-using teams across your company - without battles
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No more company-wide PTSD from software adoption projects
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Measure what really matters
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Audience: IT and CEOs
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Navigating the World’s Coming Debt Bomb
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Calling out decades of fake growth in companies and countries – why we should be worried
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When might the debt bomb explode?
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What we can learn from which companies and countries were winners after previous re-assessments of value
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Practical case studies from helping companies around the world to build and buy genuinely lasting value
Audience: Anyone in small to large business, academia or government
"Bravo, that presentation was excellent! Exactly how we wanted to kick off our annual event"
Yes, I went blonde.
Workshop Topics
"Working with you was life-changing"
1 Day Workshop: Simulate practical reactions for your organization to cyberwar, hot war and the creation of hostile trading blocks
Spend the morning playing an immersive board game to brainstorm operational and strategic implications of threats, opportunities and wildcards facing your organization in escalating levels of cold and hot wartime. For instance, how can you fix supply chains, protect people and assets and maintain revenue? Spend the afternoon analyzing lessons and creating preparedness plans to implement. This workshop has a 95% past user rating and also teaches participants to think strategically, while having fun and reducing their “fight or flight instinct” if a crisis breaks out.
Audience: Anyone in small to large business or government, including their Boards. Sessions can be multi-organization with organization-specific teams.
Audience: executives, IT, change management, middle management
About Emilie
Emilie is Founder & CEO of E5S, an AI-enabled startup empowering confidence through personalized appearance optimization. The overwhelming choices in the fragmented cosmetics, hair, fashion, exercise, diet, cosmetic dental and cosmetic surgery leave most people feeling stuck and frustrated. What if one tool could cut through the noise and give them the confidence to shine and look their best? Our freemium subscriptions will deliver personalized, merit-based, action-driven, confidence-boosting recommendations tailored to your goals, culture, budget, and time across all aspects of appearance.
She was previously the Chief Transformation Officer for Aboitiz, the Philippines’ second largest conglomerate. She created new business lines with nation-building scale and double or triple the usual profit potential. She also created programs to transform the existing companies and culture through bureaucracy busting, training hundreds of staff to succeed like they were in Big Tech and simulating how to sustain operations well during looming crises.
Before that, Emilie was CEO of ExO Works, a corporate transformation consultancy which helped large organizations like Visa, HP, BHP, Siemens Energy, Vodacom, Rio Tinto, Santos, Boston Scientific and Procter & Gamble to emulate the world’s fastest growing companies. Their clients averaged 70X return on investment from these projects and tripled retention of the talent involved.
From 2006 - 2014, Emilie sourced a range of $20 – 400 million private equity investments in energy production start-ups and technologies around the world. This meant reviewing around 100 potential investments per annum and seeing the patterns for success or failure.
From 2002 to 2005, Emilie managed corporate development and corporate relations for Sydney Gas Limited. She helped grow the startup to a $300 million valuation and was instrumental in raising the company's poor reputation to a media-recognized “market leader.”
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Emilie has given numerous keynote speeches all over the world, whether to small groups of executives and boards or to thousands of people. She is consistently highly acclaimed for distilling complex topics into memorable framings with actionable tips. She tailors all presentations to audiences and the latest news and her learnings. She is calm under pressure when AV fails or she needs to adapt the speech at the last minute, plus prides herself on speaking clients finding her very easy to work with.
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Emilie is currently based in Singapore, having grown up in Sydney and lived in New York, Los Angeles, London, Manila, Luxembourg, Houston, Dallas and Bali.
