The Thought Leadership Council’s Founder Members are part of a multi-disciplinary team who coordinate across industries.

For details on how to become a Member of the TLC, and how to embed the TLC’s work into your organisation, visit our Contact page.

Meet some of the core Thought Leadership team

Matt Potter, Founder

Matt Potter is a journalist, Chief Creative Officer, innovation and technology lead, journalist, author and broadcaster.

He’s also an investigative journalist and intelligence consultant, having worked alongside United Nations panels on everything from arms smuggling to hybrid warfare. He’s got first-hand experience of everything from MI5 interrogations (not as frightening as he expected, but a lot more worrying) Russian spy groups, Serbian regime during the Balkan wars, and Afghanistan. and He’s the author of the investigative nonfiction piece We Are All Targets: How renegade hackers invented cyber war and unleashed an age of global chaos (Hachette USA, 2023)

science junkie – a keen virology and palaeontology junkie, in 2018 he exhibited at the Science Museum in London and is a member of the ABSW – Founder of the Thought Leadership Council. He started the organisation

Nicholas Booth

Nick is NASA and Richard Feynman. He also chronicles financial security, and Black Swan events.

Kerry Hipkiss

Kerry Hipkiss is

Kian Bakhtiari

Founder of The People. TED talker. I am the founder of The People, a next-gen marketing consultancy. I was formerly Head of Strategy at Dentsu, one of the largest media and advertising groups in the world. For my contributions to marketing, I have been named as one of the Top 20 Future Leaders by the Financial Times. I’m also a Global Judge for the Festival of Media, a One Young World Ambassador, and an Agenda Contributor to the World Economic Forum. I’m passionate about bridging the gap between brands and young people. And using the power of creativity for good.

Dr Mark Galeotti

Professor Mark Galeotti is a leading expert in modern Russia and its activity in the world and at home, specialising in global security, politics, Putin’s inner circle, intelligence services and criminality. As well as running the consultancy Mayak Intelligence, he is an Honorary Professor at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, a Senior Non-Resident Fellow of the Institute of International Relations Prague, and an Associate Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy.

A prolific author, his most recent books include Putin’s Wars (Bloomsbury, 2022), The Weaponisation of Everything (Yale, 2021), We Need To Talk About Putin (Penguin, 2019) and The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia (Yale, 2018). He read history at Robinson College, Cambridge, and took his doctorate in politics at the London School of Economics. He has been Head of History at Keele University, Professor of Global Affairs at New York University, a visiting professor at Rutgers-Newark (Newark), Charles University (Prague) and MGIMO (Moscow), and a senior research fellow at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. He has advised and given evidence to a wide range of bodies, from the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly to Interpol and SHAPE.