An exciting line-up of CEOs and experts, ready to share their thoughts on what great leadership looks like in the world of today.
Our Speakers

Emmanuel Gobillot
Leadership Author, Speaker and Consultant
Described as ‘the first leadership guru for the digital generation’, Emmanuel is one of Europe’s most sought after leadership speakers, and has worked around the globe with organizations including Astra Zeneca, Google, and the UN. Before establishing his own boutique management consultancy, Emmanuel was Director of Leadership services and Head of FMCG Consulting at HayGroup UK. He is the author of seven UK and US bestselling books on leadership, three of which were co-authored with Katherine Thomas. The forthcoming eBook, “What Happens Next?” is the third instalment in their “COVID series,” written to help leaders navigate the pandemic and its aftermath. Emmanuel is a regular lecturer at the UK Government’s Cabinet Office Centre for Leadership, the Ministry of Justice Leadership School, and the Welsh Government’s Leadership Schools.

Thomas Meyer
Former CEO of Accenture in Switzerland
Thomas D. Meyer joined Accenture AG (formerly Arthur Andersen AG), and became CEO and Country Managing Director of Accenture Switzerland in 2003. He was responsible for the Accenture Insurance Sector in Europe, Africa and Latin America, and he founded and led Accenture Digital in the German-speaking area. Thomas retired from Accenture at the end of May 2020. He was Chairman and Member of the Board of the Sunrise Communications Group AG until April 2021, and continues to be a member of Economiesuisse. He joined Swisscontact’s Foundation Council in 2020, and is the Chairman of the Foundation Board since June 2021.

Leanne Spencer
Founder of Bodyshot Performance Limited
Leanne is an award-winning entrepreneur and founder of Bodyshot Performance Limited. She delivered a TEDx talk on ‘why fitness is more important than weight’ and has authored bestselling books Remove the Guesswork and Rise and Shine. Her company Bodyshot Performance uses technology and science-based solutions to promote wellbeing and create happy, healthy, resilient teams. Leanne facilitates workshops for Diversity Role Models, a charity working to combat homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying, and recently completed the world’s toughest ski race, raising over ten thousand pounds for Alzheimer’s Research. Leanne believes, as Thoreau said, that everyone should “suck all the marrow out of life.

Carsten Sudhoff
Member of Management Team von Rundstedt Switzerland and Entrepreneur
Over the course of his career, Carsten Sudhoff held several senior leadership roles, and lived in eight countries on three different continents. During his five years as member of the executive team and Chief Human Resources Officer of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Carsten led an international think tank dedicated to the “New Models of Leadership”. Today, Carsten is a serial entrepreneur and Member of the Management Team of von Rundstedt, the leading career development company in Switzerland.
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Our Panellists

Ulrike Goose
Former CIO of A1 Telekom
Ulrike Goose has guided well-known global companies through major changes. As CIO of A1 Telekom Austria, she took on the challenge of integrating work cultures from different business units, while respecting their different ways of working. She also helped manage the change to offshoring in India, which meant adapting processes and roles.
Ulrike then went on to become Director of B2B IT at Vodafone where she kicked off the company’s third generation outsourcing initiative by re-insourcing B2B software development to a company-owned division in India. Most recently, as Managing Director of E.ON Digital Technology, she has helped see E.ON through one of the largest mergers in Europe.
Ulrike then went on to become Director of B2B IT at Vodafone where she kicked off the company’s third generation outsourcing initiative by re-insourcing B2B software development to a company-owned division in India. Most recently, as Managing Director of E.ON Digital Technology, she has helped see E.ON through one of the largest mergers in Europe.

Tobias Häckermann
CEO of Sherpany
Tobias Häckermann is a serial entrepreneur, tech enthusiast, and the CEO and founder of Sherpany. Prior to Sherpany, Tobias successfully started and sold two start-ups while he was still a student. He holds an MA in Law from the University of Zürich and a BA in Law from the University of Siena. Dynamic, innovative, and forward-looking, Tobias brings top companies into the 2.0 world. His work is dedicated to engaging Executives with technology to reach their full potential as decision makers. In 2012, Tobias was named by Venture Labs as a ‘Venture Leader’ and Sherpany was named as one of the TOP 100 Swiss Startups from 2012 to 2016

Elizabeth Immer
Product Design Lead at Sherpany
Why do we do what we do? So often: Why don’t people (we) do what they should do, or even what they want to do? As leaders and designers, can we create environments that systematically help us, our teams and our users consistently do better, happily? Elizabeth Immer is convinced that the answer to this question is “yes”, and that behavioral science can be a tremendously powerful toolbox in these efforts. Her professional background includes a tenure researching cooperation and social preferences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), strategy and product consulting with FehrAdvice & Partners and at the Ergonomen, helping corporations from a wide swath of industries to transform their environments, communications and products to better support "good" behavior. In one recent mandate, she advised Swisscom in transforming their billing and collection approach, saving more than $10 million and achieving extraordinarily high customer satisfaction through small tweaks to the users’ experience. At Sherpany, Elizabeth leads her team to develop policies, processes and products that support leaders to behave better and more effectively lead their teams to peak performance using meetings as an anchor moment.

Miriam Mertens
Founder & CEO of DeepSkill
Miriam Mertens passion is the tech-industry, people-centred leadership and sustainability - preferably all three in combination. As co-founder and CEO of DeepSkill, a digital platform for development, she has turned her passion into a business now.
Miriam worked as software developer and management consultant in Asia, Africa and Europe and founded her first own company, a web design agency, in 2001 followed by a non-profit organisation with a focus on leadership in 2010, her own coworking space in 2014 and since 2018 has been on the Advisory Council of Digital Renewables, a green commodity platform.
She was responsible for the startup division of Deutsche Telekom and developed Germany's largest tech startup programme, which has supported more than 400 startups to date.
As a speaker and consultant, in addition to her start-up, she is particularly committed to female empowerment and more empathy and humanity in business and fairer capital distribution in the venture capital sector.
Miriam worked as software developer and management consultant in Asia, Africa and Europe and founded her first own company, a web design agency, in 2001 followed by a non-profit organisation with a focus on leadership in 2010, her own coworking space in 2014 and since 2018 has been on the Advisory Council of Digital Renewables, a green commodity platform.
She was responsible for the startup division of Deutsche Telekom and developed Germany's largest tech startup programme, which has supported more than 400 startups to date.
As a speaker and consultant, in addition to her start-up, she is particularly committed to female empowerment and more empathy and humanity in business and fairer capital distribution in the venture capital sector.
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Susanne Ruoff
CEO & Owner Ruoff Advisory GmbH
Susanne Ruoff is an accomplished CEO, Board member, and Advisor, with a strong track record of driving results through business transformation and digitalisation. She has more than 30 years’ experience in national and international businesses, across a range of sectors, including Logistics/Healthcare, Technology, Payments, Outsourcing and Telecommunications. Susanne has spent more than 12 year as a CEO and Board member. Before this, she served as CEO of Swiss Post, which has a revenue of 8bn CHF and 60,000 employees. Most recently Susanne has been working with her own advisory company with different clients including Ascom, a Global Solution provider in Healthcare ICT, and others.

Corinna Voges
Integral Business Coach focusing on Cultural Coaching
Corinna Voges is an experienced business professional with more than 30 years leadership & executive experience in Marketing & Communications including culture and brand responsibility.
During her career she was able to work with and gain insights in various companies. This includes working as Group Director Marketing & Communications for more than 10 years with the dynamic start-up gedas – an IT-company owned by Volkswagen which started from the scratch growing up to 5.500 employees with worldwide offices. Corinna then continued successfully with T-Systems – the business subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom – as Vice President International Marketing with worldwide responsibilty for more than 10 years.
Out of her international responsibility she established a deep knowledge in successfully building up and leading international, intercultural and virtual teams.
Based on her various insights, Corinna discovered that companies are more successful and their employees happier and more satisfied when they share the same beliefs.
Therefore she helps companies to carve out the core of their culture in an authentic and precise way and enables the employees to connect themselves with their own values as a basis for a mutual value consistency check. Shared values are a strong connection between companies and their employees. They are the foundation for a motivated and credible unity where every employee becomes a valuable brand ambassador.
During her career she was able to work with and gain insights in various companies. This includes working as Group Director Marketing & Communications for more than 10 years with the dynamic start-up gedas – an IT-company owned by Volkswagen which started from the scratch growing up to 5.500 employees with worldwide offices. Corinna then continued successfully with T-Systems – the business subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom – as Vice President International Marketing with worldwide responsibilty for more than 10 years.
Out of her international responsibility she established a deep knowledge in successfully building up and leading international, intercultural and virtual teams.
Based on her various insights, Corinna discovered that companies are more successful and their employees happier and more satisfied when they share the same beliefs.
Therefore she helps companies to carve out the core of their culture in an authentic and precise way and enables the employees to connect themselves with their own values as a basis for a mutual value consistency check. Shared values are a strong connection between companies and their employees. They are the foundation for a motivated and credible unity where every employee becomes a valuable brand ambassador.

Rolf Watter
Former chairman of PostFinance and chairman and member of several other boards
Prof. Dr. Rolf Watter is a partner with the Swiss law firm Bär & Karrer and has led the transaction practice of the firm, the Swiss market leader, for more than 35 years; he was lead counsel in numerous transactions, e.g. the mergers leading to the creation of Novartis or UBS, the spin-offs of Syngenta, Lonza or Alcon and acquisitions of Swiss by Lufthansa or Syngenta by Chemchina. He was chairman of PostFinance AG, a Swiss systemically relevant retail bank, of CEVA, a logistics company and of Nobel Biocare, a dental implant producer. He was a board member inter alia of Syngenta, Zurich Insurance and Centerpulse. He also teaches as a professor at the University of Zurich.
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Our Host

Nisha Pillai
Conference Moderator
An experienced host and motivational speaker, Nisha is a former news presenter with over twenty years’ experience. She has anchored rolling news and conducted award-winning investigations for Panorama and the BBC Money Programme. Nisha’s experience covers many sectors, from economics and finance, to a range of UN agencies and even the physics powerhouse CERN. Recently, she worked for the UN Secretary General’s office during General Assembly Week. This culminated in the High Level Dialogue on Energy, a historic nine-hour gathering of leaders, which was last held more than forty years ago. Other recent projects include a podcast for Julius Baer, a product launch for Visa, and a private CEO roundtable for PWC.
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