Keynote lineup

Judit Polgár offers a distinctive and intellectually stimulating perspective through the lens of elite strategic thinking. As the strongest female chess player in history, she translates lessons from competitive chess into leadership, decision-making, and foresight. Senior leaders gain insights into pattern recognition, managing complexity, anticipating consequences, and staying calm under pressure. Her session encourages executives to think several moves ahead, challenge conventional wisdom, and embrace continuous learning. As a keynote or fireside conversation, she leaves audiences with a refreshed mindset on strategy, one that values preparation, adaptability, and disciplined thinking in uncertain environments.

A global ambassador for chess in education, she is the founder of the Judit Polgar’s Global Chess Festival, a TED speaker, and the author of a widely acclaimed three volume autobiography combining elite chess mastery with personal storytelling. She also created the Judit Polgar Method, using chess to develop critical thinking and key life skills in children.

She began playing chess at five and became the world’s top ranked woman at just twelve, a position she held for 26 years. By fourteen, she had won five gold medals at Women’s Chess Olympiads. In 1991, at 15 years and 4 months, she became an international grandmaster, breaking Bobby Fischer’s age record. Competing exclusively in open events after 1990, she faced and defeated the strongest male players of her era, including eleven world champions. She competed for the men’s World Championship title in 2005 and remains the only woman to surpass a 2700 rating and enter the world’s top ten.

In 2012, she founded the Judit Polgar Chess Foundation to advance chess in education and society. Since retiring from competitive play in 2014, she has led the foundation’s global initiatives, organized major international events, written extensively, and worked as a lecturer, keynote speaker, and expert commentator at top level chess forums worldwide.

Rainer Hersch encourages managers striving to lead high-performance teams to find inspiration in the concert hall. At the heart of this is collaboration: listening, communicating, and working together effectively as a team to produce a wonderful result.

Rainer Hersch has performed in more than thirty countries and worked with orchestras ranging from the St Petersburg Philharmonic to the Tasmanian Symphony. His YouTube performances have generated over 100 million views worldwide. Born in London to an English mother and German father, he trained as a pianist under Norma Fisher and later studied conducting at Blackheath Conservatory. His development included masterclasses at the Royal Academy of Music and specialist study of Johann Strauss at the Vienna Volksoper.

Rainer began his career in concert management, working with leading classical artists, while simultaneously performing stand up comedy on the London cabaret circuit. In 1991, he left arts management to pursue comedy full time. The two worlds merged in 1999 with the creation of the Rainer Hersch Orkestra at the Edinburgh Festival.

His work with the Orkestra led to guest conducting engagements with major symphony orchestras, including the Philharmonia, CBSO, BBC Concert Orchestra, and the Johann Strauss Orchestra, with whom he toured for four years. He is also a respected broadcaster for the BBC and Classic FM.

Professor Arturo Bris is an award-winning teacher and program director, he ranks among the top 100 most-read finance academics worldwide. He is the author of several books, a frequent speaker at international conferences, and appears regularly on international media outlets.

His work has been published in The Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, The Review of Financial Studies, The Journal of Legal Studies, and The Journal of Business. He has also had articles published in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Handelsblatt, among others.

Bris’s areas of expertise include corporate finance, corporate governance, financial regulation, and competitiveness. As Director of the IMD World Competitiveness Center, he works with governments all over the world assessing, measuring, and managing the competitiveness of countries. The WCC produces trusted annual rankings on economies’ competitiveness, and, under his leadership, it has expanded its coverage by adding new rankings on talent, digital competitiveness, and smart cities.

Nearly 25% of French people under 35 get their news from HugoDécrypte at least once a week, cited more than Le Monde, Libération, and Le Figaro combined (Reuters Digital News Report 2025).

Hugo Décrypte founded the YouTube channel “HugoDécrypte” in 2015 while he was still a student. Today, supported by a team of over 40 people, he keeps more than 20 million subscribers informed daily across all his platforms, making him a true voice of his generation. Since 2015, HugoDécrypte’s ambition has never wavered: making news accessible to everyone, and especially to young people.

Winner of the 2026 Spotify Awards for “Male Host of the Year” and “News Show,” he knows how to adapt to different styles and a wide range of personalities: political leaders (President Zelensky, President Macron), athletes (Victor Wembanyama), entrepreneurs (Bill Gates), artists (Billie Eilish, Christopher Nolan, Lady Gaga), and content creators (Squeezie).

Fabiola Gianotti, PhD, is a particle physicist who served as CERN’s Director-General from 2016 to 2025, the first woman to hold the post and the first Director-General appointed for two full terms. She has made major contributions to several CERN experiments, working on detector R&D and construction, software development, and data analysis, with particular emphasis on technologies and strategies to search for the Higgs boson. As head of the ATLAS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, she played a leading role in the 2012 discovery of this particle.

She has received 16 honorary doctorates worldwide and numerous prizes, including the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society, and the Tate Medal of the American Institute of Physics for International Leadership. She is a foreign member of seven academies and has been awarded the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. In 2012, Time magazine named her one of the top five “Person of the Year.”

As President of IMD, a position he has held since September 2024, David Bach is focused on making IMD the world’s most impactful business school. Together with his leadership team and the entire IMD community, he is working to broaden and deepen IMD’s global impact through learning innovation, excellence in degree- and executive programs, and applied thought leadership.

As Nestlé Professor of Strategy and Political Economy, Bach helps leaders navigate the myriad political challenges facing business today. A celebrated teacher, his course ‘The End of Globalization?’ received the 2018 Ideas Worth Teaching Award from the Aspen Institute.

Chef Pam (Pichaya Soontornyanakij) was the youngest and first-ever female chef to receive this Michelin Thailand Opening of the Year Award together with 1 Michelin star for Restaurant POTONG.

The MICHELIN Opening of the Year Award is given to Chef Pam and POTONG for the successful opening of a dining venue over the past 12 months, with a creative degustation concept and cuisine approach, which has had an impact on the local gastronomic scene.

Being the first recipient of this special award in Thailand, Chef Pam is recognized for her successful opening of the restaurant, Potong, in the heart of Chinatown. She has renovated her family’s ancestral building that used to be a pharmacy, in spite of trying times during the Covid-19 period. It was the first restaurant of its kind to serve innovative/progressive Thai-Chinese cuisine in Thailand, with a 20-course Tasting Menu, whereby each dish embodies the 5-Element philosophy of “Salt, Acid, Spice, Texture, and Millard Reaction”. The restaurant also won its first Michelin star at the same time.

Kiran Bedi is an Indian social activist who was the first woman to join the Indian Police Service (IPS) and who was instrumental in introducing prison reform in India.

Bedi earned recognition for the work she did as inspector general of prisons, beginning in 1994. In that capacity she reshaped one of the largest prisons in the world—the Tihar prison complex, in Delhi—by addressing the corruption and human rights abuses she found there. She targeted sanitation and nutrition problems at Tihar and also implemented new literacy and drug treatment programs there.

oman Lo is the vice chairman and managing director of Regal Hotels International. She is also the founding managing partner of AlphaTrio Capital, an Asia-focused sustainable technology fund empowering green tech unicorns to provide disruptive solutions for the world’s most pressing environmental challenges; and the founder of the non-profit Institute of Sustainability and Technology, with a mission to nurture ESG talent through executive education and advance the sustainability agenda through interdisciplinary research and international conferences.

Poman Lo is the only person in Hong Kong to receive both the Outstanding Young Person of the World Award and the Hong Kong Outstanding Students Award. She is also the first and only female Asian recipient of the Oslo Business for Peace Award by the Business for Peace Foundation in Norway.