"She has done as much over the years for battling females as any woman since Boadicea.”
The Spectator
Alison Kervin OBE has spent forty years exploring what makes people, teams and organisations succeed, and what happens when cultures fail. Her work sits where leadership, culture and storytelling meet.
She has interviewed more than 300 of the world’s leading athletes, coaches and public figures; become the first woman to edit the sports section of a British national newspaper; written forty books; led a campaign that changed the way British sport approaches concussion; and investigated institutional failure in her bestselling HarperCollins book, The Monster of Harrods.
Across her speaking, writing and advisory work, Alison returns to three important questions:
What enables people and teams to perform at their best?
How do organisational cultures succeed—or go badly wrong?
How can one person create meaningful change?
Those questions underpin her talks on elite performance, leadership, organisational culture and women in business—as well as her work helping organisations uncover and communicate the stories that matter.
The career behind the work
Alison became the first woman to edit the sports section of a national newspaper in 2013, when she took over the Mail on Sunday and ran it for eight years. Before that, she was rugby editor at The Times, chief sports interviewer at The Daily Telegraph, and editor of Rugby World, the biggest-selling rugby magazine in the world.
She has interviewed Sean Connery, Prince Edward, Nick Faldo, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Martin Johnson, Kelly Holmes, Denise Lewis, Jessica Ennis-Hill, Jonny Wilkinson and Stuart Broad, among hundreds of others.
In 1991, she became the first woman to referee a rugby match at Twickenham.
She holds coaching qualifications in ten sports, was once part of the England gymnastics squad, and sits on the judging panels for the BAFTAs, BBC Sports Personality of the Year and the Laureus International Sports Awards.
She also writes novels under the name Bernice Bloom.
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Today
Alison now works across three connected areas.
As a keynote speaker, she speaks on leadership, organisational culture, high performance and creating change.
Through Gold Medals Media, she helps organisations develop their media strategy and turn their expertise into stories that people notice, understand and remember.
Through the British Academy of Writing, she teaches writers how to develop, shape and communicate their ideas.
Different audiences, but the same underlying work: understanding people, finding the story and helping to create change.
Alison speaks internationally on leadership, high performance, and the lessons of 40 years in elite sport. The first conversation is always free.
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