Henry Wong

The best leaders aren’t just decision-makers. They’re storytellers. Behind every high-performing team, aligned culture, or successful change initiative is a leader who knows how to shape the story.

Narrative Intelligence is the ability to sense, shape, and shift the narratives that influence behavior, mindset, and performance. It’s not about telling better stories. It’s about using story as a strategic tool to lead through complexity, build trust, and create lasting impact.

In this thought-provoking keynote, brand strategist and former Saatchi & Saatchi EVP Henry Wong unpacks how the most effective leaders from Fortune 500 CEOs to startup founders use narrative to engage teams, reframe challenges, and drive results. Drawing from 25+ years of brand leadership and recent work with companies like Borealis Foods, Henry offers an actionable framework leaders can apply immediately.

This session is ideal for executives, people leaders, and changemakers looking to elevate their influence and lead with more clarity, alignment, and purpose. Participants will walk away with a new lens on leadership and the story-based tools to activate it.

What happens when your child chooses a path completely different from what you imagined even giving up a promising future to become a monk?

This deeply personal talk explores what it really means to find happiness, redefine success, and let go of expectations our own and those the world places on us. Henry Wong, a success creative director, formerly of Saatchi & Saatchi and brand strategist shares the story of his son’s decision and the journey it sparked: one of humility, identity, and reconnection.

Blending storytelling with insight, Henry offers an honest and inspiring reflection on purpose, values, and the quiet power of acceptance. In a world obsessed with achievement, this keynote invites audiences to ask: What truly matters? And what if happiness isn’t something you chase, but something you allow?

Whether you’re a parent, a leader, or someone navigating your own turning point, this talk will challenge, move, and encourage you to see success through a more human lens.

Today, everything and everyone is a brand. People in business and careers recognize they have to work on their brand but seldom know how to achieve it. Just becoming known or gathering social media followers is not enough. Standing for something is everything. And a personal brand not only provides a competitive advantage but adds a premium to your value.

How to build a personal brand through the use of story. It’s an overview of Henry’s best practices and allows the audience to work through the steps together.

Henry Wong’s talk will help unlock each attendee’s desired brand and unique position using his process to work through assessing oneself, determining key personal brand elements and expressing one’s brand through the use of story. Henry will help identify their superpower, unlock their brand personality, shape a brand narrative, and provide thoughts on rebranding and the power of making emotional connections. Taking it further, he shows how to apply the brand in all parts of one’s business career from networking to social media.

Ideal for entrepreneurs, small businesses, founders, and sales organizations but this has resonated with groups and conferences that focus on personal development.

This keynote centres on the principles of storytelling that are used in creating successful product campaigns. With 30 seconds to 60 seconds to get an idea across in a compelling way, and a call to action, it’s the perfect structure that entrepreneurs and business leaders can use.

Your brand vs. your company brand

A variation of this keynote is available for employee groups. What happens when your brand doesn’t align with your company’s brand? Henry shares his unique approach and methods in forming a personal brand against the backdrop of the organization’s brand. We may be the company we keep but for many, there is a disconnect of who we are authentically versus who we become for the company we work. Henry Wong’s talk will help team members reconcile the two in forming their personal brands, discuss how organizations need to rethink how they hire, answer what to do when personal beliefs and public (online) presence affects an organization’s reputation.

Good for larger legacy organizations, government bodies or companies in which the culture is non-existent or needs renewal.

With his experience of shaping scores of start-ups across financial, food, tech and manufacturing, Henry shares his insights into the creative thinking and innovation that has made start-up companies a success. As a creative director, his business is one of being innovative and fresh. Drawing from the elements that have made for creative thinking, Henry shares how to bring that into any type of organization.

Henry Wong touches on how to create the right culture for fresh thinking, understanding the power of failure, rethinking the hierarchy, how to invert problems to get to ideas and solutions, and how wrong thinking can actually be good for an organization. Through it, he shares his perspective on why mission statements should be retired when thinking like a start-up doesn’t work, how to hire the right people and bringing all the elements together that managers and leaders can apply successfully.

It seems, being a Yoda makes one a better leader. Studies show that mentors are six times more likely to be promoted than managers and employees who don’t mentor.

This is just the beginning. While people tend to view mentorship as a way to help and guide the less experienced, the benefits to those in a leadership role are more profound.

This keynote offers insights from Henry’s 30 years of being on both sides of the mentoring fence. In his talk, he covers how mentoring can improve one’s own practical skills and create a sure-footedness in one’s leadership. Henry outlines how reverse mentoring can be used to a leader’s own benefit and why it’s important to mentor for the benefit of the greater good.

In addition to inspiring leaders, Henry Wong delves into practical points to maximize the mentor/mentee relationship with guidelines on how to be a proper mentor, understanding active listening and being present, why a suitable environment is important, and how being ego-free is not a weakness.

This talk has benefited a broad range of personnel from leadership and entrepreneurial groups, and managers in both government and corporate sectors.