Caspar Berry

Risk Taking & Decision Keynote Speaker

Caspar Berry is a Cambridge Educated, former Professional Poker Player and thought-provoking business speaker on Risk Taking & Decision Making.

Caspar Berry started his working life at the age of 16 as an actor in the first two series of BBC drama Byker Grove with “Ant and Dec”. They went on to become two of the most famous people in the UK and Caspar went on to study economics at Cambridge where he had early commercial success directing award-winning short films and TV commercials from the age of 18. He went on to write two feature films which were produced by Film Four and Columbia Tri Star before he had graduated. He did not get a very good degree.

He went on to write and direct in the film and television industry for much of the next four years before deciding that he was heading towards the age of 30 without having lived much of life outside of that crazy and unreal world. So aged 26, he decided to take a risk and move to Las Vegas with his life savings in his pocket.

Playing poker was disciplining, testing and demanding but also incredibly emotionally rewarding as he conquered the challenges it posed and made a living as a professional poker player at the tables of Las Vegas.

After three years, however, he decided that his future lay away from the poker table and he returned to the UK and set up Twenty First Century Media which he built to a team of 40 before selling to Bob Geldof’s Ten Alps plc.

At around this time, in 2005, the poker boom happened, and Caspar had already started speaking professionally so he moved to London to create a portfolio career as a trainer for the Mind Gym by day (delivering over 400 sessions to 100 companies) and a TV poker commentator by night (doing over 2000 hours of live broadcasting on poker channels and Sky Sports).In 2006 he was asked to be one of the two poker advisors on the James Bond movie “Casino Royale”, tasked with training the actors up to look like professional poker players for the key scenes.

In the last 14 years Caspar Berry has delivered over 2,000 speeches and training sessions in more than 30 countries for nearly 500 organisations including the biggest companies in the world.

He now mentors young speakers and brings together all the otherwise disparate skills he’s learnt over his career – writing, directing, training, economics – to help young speakers craft messages culled from their own life that are focused on helping people and businesses make profound changes in all manner of ways.

SPEAKING TOPICS

Caspar Berry’s main speeches are based around Decision Making but the subject covers a whole range of ancillary subject-areas such as risk, judgement, intuition and insight. These in turn apply to a huge range of business areas – and conference themes – such as change, leadership, innovation, entrepreneurship uncertainty (VUCA), differentiation, courage, resilience, interpreting data, investing and motivation.

Depending on the subject covered, participants can experience a variety of the following lessons and benefits:

1) A new toolset to overcome the challenges posed by uncertainty in volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous circumstances. (VUCA)

2) A new mindset and a way of breaking out of old risk-averse habits and methodologies which respects risk-taking and the unknown as necessary evils which can be harnessed for their benefit.

3) A better understanding of the power – and limitations – of intuition and the impact of their emotions – good and bad – on the decision-making process.

4) Greater motivation and resilience to keep trying when the going gets tough.

5) A greater appreciation of what a decision is and how to take control of their subconscious decision-making process to maximize returns by any metric

6) The ability to cascade such a mindset down through an organisation so that employees feel more comfortable with uncertainty and risk-taking so that they can better embrace change, innovate and seize opportunity.

The aim of all sessions is to empower people to contribute to a culture that is more long-term in its thinking, more comfortable making decisions and taking calculated risks with the intention of being more profitable as a result.