Series 1/Episode 4 - Catherine Baez

Her dream dinner party guests are Maximus from Gladiator, Professor McGonagall, and Tony Stark. And she once had to talk herself out of a very dramatic moment by simply saying out loud... "this is temporary, this is temporary".... until it was.

Catherine spent twenty years working with the most vulnerable young people in a county. Kids navigating substance abuse, family breakdown, crises that most of us never have to look at directly. She built real expertise. Real relationships. A career trajectory that people in her field spend a lifetime reaching for.

Then life asked her to start again. New city. New context. Twenty years of experience that the corporate world looked at and said; "we don't quite see it. Try this entry-level role instead."

Showed up anyway. Found one leader who looked at her differently than everyone else had. And walked through a door that made no logical sense on paper.

On the other side of that door she discovered something worth the whole journey. That everything she had built helping the most vulnerable people reach their potential had quietly prepared her to help everyone else do the same thing. The skills just had different names now.

This is a warm but serious conversation about what it costs to go backwards before you can go forward. And there is a moment where she says something so quietly true that we had to stop and sit with it.

This one is for anyone who has ever been told their experience does not translate.

It does. You just need the right person to see it.

"Do not believe everything you hear. Know who you are and the skills that you own." — Catherine Baez

Series 1/Episode 3 - Will Warren is an operations and people leader whose story is, at its core, about one thing: understanding what human beings are actually capable of, and building everything around that.For more than thirty years he built and led high performing teams inside one of the world's most recognised companies. Not by directing from above. By learning from the inside. What does this specific person need to do their best work? What are they genuinely capable of that their job description doesn't capture? How does the team need to be structured to get the best of every individual in it, rather than fitting every individual into a predetermined shape?That question became the spine of everything he built professionally. And it became the spine of what he built next.The Grey Rabbit sits on Wealthy Street in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A room for forty five people. Original art on every wall. A hand carved bar from a demolished nineteenth century French church behind the counter. And a team of people between 21 and 28 years old who are receiving, whether they fully know it yet or not, one of the most valuable leadership educations available anywhere.Will Warren spent a career understanding what people are capable of. He is now passing that understanding on to the generation that needs it most.

Series 1/Episode 2

Alaina Schnipke has been the one asking the hard questions on this series, pulling at the seams. Today we turn the mic around.

Alaina has spent a decade building systems inside some of the most demanding people operations teams; Goldman Sachs, Amazon AWS, Hinge Health, running talent, scaling, and transformation work at high pressure. She built a pre‑IPO people tech stack, launched an international entity, holds multiple recruiting certifications, and started her career teaching public speaking, which is why she’s so direct, clear, and unexpectedly warm.

What makes Alaina compelling right now is that she’s living the disruption at the core of this series; a new job, a new city, split‑living with her partner, and the weird, quiet work of re‑building a life after years of building systems for other people.

Martyna Urban is a coach, consultant, and former corporate TA leader whose career reads like three separate lives that, in retrospect, were always the same life. She arrived in London with almost no English, built a career in one of the world's most demanding corporate environments, and then, at the exact moment everything looked most successful, started hearing the signal she'd been ignoring for many years. She listened. What she built next is the most honest version of who she always was.
She is precise, self-aware, and allergic to comfortable answers. She is also, in the best possible way, still working it out. That combination is rare. It's why she's in this chair.

Toby Culshaw literally wrote the book on talent intelligence. Not as a credential, as a description. When the field of talent intelligence was still fighting for a seat at the table, he was already building the methodology that would define it. His career sits at the intersection of labour market analysis, workforce strategy, and the specific discipline of turning data into decisions that organisations actually make differently.
He has operated inside some of the world's most complex talent environments, built intelligence functions before most organisations knew they needed them, and published thinking, through the Talent Intelligence Collective, that has shaped how practitioners around the world understand what the field is for and what it can do.
What makes Toby unusual is the combination: rigorous technical intelligence capability alongside a genuine willingness to say the uncomfortable thing. He does not do conference-keynote optimism. He does not soften the diagnosis to protect the room. What he has to say about the gap between where talent strategy is and where it needs to go is specific, evidence-grounded, and deliberately honest.