Julie Castle has dedicated her life to saving animals. Since joining Best Friends Animal Society in 1996 as employee #17, she has grown with the organization and advanced its mission to save the lives of dogs and cats in America’s animal shelters.

Now CEO, Julie has helped guide Best Friends through a period of significant growth, including expanding the organization’s fundraising from $60 million to more than $130 million. Under her leadership, Best Friends has been recognized as a Harris Poll Brand of the Year four times and named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies. Throughout her career, Julie has championed an approach rooted in collaboration, helping bring together shelters, rescues, and communities around our shared commitment to lifesaving.

Celebrating 30 years with Best Friends in 2026, Julie remains focused on strengthening the partnerships, policies, and momentum needed to help every shelter and every community reach no-kill. She leads a team of nearly 1,000 employees working toward one shared mission: Save Them All.

KennethRoMD.com is a double board-certified Internal Medicine and Emergency Medicine physician who has treated more than 170,000 patients across a 35-year ER career. His book PRIME reframes midlife as a powerful awakening rather than decline. He created the RECLAIM™ Method to restore men’s vitality, identity, and purpose through precision medicine, neuroscience, narrative psychology, and emotional reintegration. He is a medical expert in filmmaker Charles Mattocks’ upcoming international docuseries about sleep and health, bringing attention to the invisible epidemic of sleep disorders destroying men’s vitality. Dr.Rospeaks to corporations, executive teams, and healthcare organizations about the silent burnout dismantling men’s performance in midlife— and teaches organizations how to rebuild resilience using precision-health tools and his RECLAIM™ framework.

DuncanBrandis a leadership and organizational effectiveness advisor, author ofMind the Gap, and founder of Intrinsic Leader. He has worked with nearly 100 organizations across healthcare, technology, finance, and the public sector, helping leaders strengthen culture, succession planning, and team effectiveness. Drawing from firsthand experience during the financial crisis at the Federal Reserve and throughout COVID-era healthcare challenges,Duncanfocuses on helping organizations move beyond outdated leadership models and build people-first systems that support adaptability, engagement, and long-term effectiveness in the modern workplace.

Nelson Nigel is the Founder and CEO of Moto Nation. 

Back in 2016 Nelson as an Uber driver noticed that taxis and car services do not offer installed child car seats, and parents are helpless.

He found a void in the transportation marketplace that Uber and Lyft have explicitly left open. 

Nelson created a mobile app to provide a convenient and safe alternative to lugging car seats to and from airports to change how parents travel with small children.

Today, Kidmoto is a trusted brand that connects parents to a network of professionally trained drivers that provide airport transfers with secured child car seats for safe and convenient airport travel in 52 US cities.

After operating for 6 years Kidmoto has over 40k completed rides, 40 part-time employees, 500 independent drivers nationwide, over a 7-figure revenue for 2024 and is valued at $25 million.

Dr. Jennifer Berry 

Dr. Jennifer Berry is a transformational leader driving purposeful collaboration between education, industry, and community ecosystems. As CEO of SmartLab, she champions mission-driven innovation that equips learners for tomorrow's workforce and fosters systemic change that matters for partners, funders, and communities. Her work accelerates strategic partnerships, measurable outcomes, and shared impact at scale.

Andrew Johnson is a leadership advisor and author of Iron Sharpens Iron, where he explores how the operating systems of elite sport can help businesses build stronger accountability, execution, and performance cultures. Drawing from lessons in professional sport, particularly the NFL, Andrew translates concepts like scoreboard clarity, roster discipline, standards under pressure, and “tape review” into practical frameworks leaders can apply inside modern organisations. His work focuses on helping companies move from average to elite by creating cultures where accountability is visible, standards are consistent, and performance improves because there is nowhere to hide. As a podcast guest, Andrew brings a practical and thought-provoking perspective on leadership, competition, talent, and sustained high performance.

Jon is the co-founder of Pickle, as well as a Physical Therapist. He’s been featured by organizations such as NYU, the University of Oxford,  WebPT,  and the United Nations, working with healthcare executives around the globe on workforce strategy and big data analytics.

Jonathon holds an MBA from the University of Oxford (UK) and a DPT from Virginia Commonwealth University. He is also a board-certified orthopedic clinical specialist, and fellow of the American Academy of Orthopedic Manual Physical Therapists.

Sandra Crespo, LCSW, is a sought-after speaker, executive coach, and mental health professional who helps organizations build workplaces where “neurospicy” talent can thrive. Her work sits at the intersection of mental health, systems thinking, and leadership development, reframing how ADHD shows up in high-performing environments beyond pathology or productivity fixes to real-world experiences like communication, burnout, creativity, and decision-making. She has spoken on major stages including AfroTech, created the S.P.I.C.Y. Framework to help organizations turn neurodiversity into a meaningful advantage, collaborates with the National Association of Social Workers, serves on the board of CHADD, and is pursuing doctoral research focused on ADHD.

Dr. Rebecca Homkes is an economist and high-growth strategy specialist who advises CEOs and executive teams focused on growth and success through uncertainty.

Uncertainty isn’t new and we've pretty much "normalized" it at this point—but what’s different now is the stacking of uncertainty. Tariffs, AI disruption, shifting policy signals, and constant organizational change are all hitting leaders at once. The result isn’t just uncertainty—it’s chaos. And chaos has a cost.

Dr. Homkes helps leaders understand why uncertainty is inevitable, but chaos is optional— and how the best leaders can build clarity, momentum, and growth even when the external environment is unpredictable and ever-changing. 

Dr. Homkes is a Lecturer at London Business School and Duke Corporate Executive Education, and the director of the Young Presidents' Organization (YPO) global Active Learning Program. She's also the author of Survive Reset Thrive and a frequent contributor on Bloomberg and CNBC

Ingrid Curtis -- she spent 17 years helping build one of the most ambitious digital transformation platforms in enterprise. She then became its CEO, and her first move was to say the whole thing needed to be rebuilt. 

She has a rare kind of credibility; she didn’t just form opinions about why enterprise aI initiatives keep failing, she helped build the infrastructure that’s now becoming the bottleneck. And rather than quietly course-correct, she’s calling it out openly. 

As CEO of Sparq, she’s repositioning the company from digital-first to data-first, and she believes this shift is about to become the defining leadership challenge in enterprise.