Ecademy's Penny Power looked at social media and how communication styles can impact results. She thinks that  communication is becoming more open, more selective and more collaborative. Penny said: “My desire throughout this talk will be to help business people who have grown up with 20th Century corporate values to adapt to a world that is very different.

“Communication styles have changed throughout the past 30-40 years. A more casual approach has been adopted in industry.

“However, marketing communication inside the online world is even more radical. It is one of conversation not broadcasting. Conversation marketing and achieving success because of ‘who you are and what trust you create’, not ‘what you do and sell’ is becoming the ‘success factor’ for businesses.”

As a behavioural psychiatrist by background, Dr Leandro Herrero knows only too well how people’s behaviour can influence an organisation. Now, after many years’ experience in industry, he is using his expertise to help businesses adopt a radically different approach to achieving change and improving performance.

Through the Chalfont Project (www.thechalfontproject.com), a consulting company of organisational architects that he founded in 2000, he works with a broad range of international clients, from Fortune 500 to small start-ups, focusing on innovation, behavioural change, leadership and human collaboration.

Dr Herrero maintains that the traditional methods of change management are slow, painful and largely unsuccessful. Large-scale initiatives that are cascaded down through big, unwieldy communication programmes are ineffective, he said.