Bradley Hook.

In the late nineties Brad Hook shifted from photojournalism into the emerging internet economy, working with organisations including Unilever, Cable & Wireless and Lloyds of London in the foundational years of the digital era. After gaining experience in the UK, he moved to Australia and founded a brand and digital agency in Sydney, building platforms for National Australia Bank, Australia Post and the University of Sydney.

In 2001 he partnered with Ian Hutchinson, the award-winning founder of Life by Design. Together they created well-being and culture-change platforms like meCentral, adopted by half of Australia's top ten companies. This was Brad's initiation into positive psychology, behavioural science, workplace culture and organisational change. The programme reached hundreds of thousands of people globally, Ian was named Australian Educator of the Year in 2012, and the partnership continued for over a decade, including through Brad's adventure-travel years.

Alongside this work, Brad launched several startups, including Surfd.com, a global home for surf culture and storytelling that still runs today, and Tick Green, created in 2007 as one of the world's first carbon-offset platforms, which quickly gained traction with high-profile companies seeking to reduce their footprints.

By 2010 the agency years had caught up with him: Brad burnt out. The recovery became the research. He set out to learn the mechanics of sustainable high performance from people who lived it, travelling extensively and writing for travel and business magazines while interviewing masters of their craft: business leaders and monks, martial artists and scientists, cross-referencing what they told him with behavioural science and neuroscience. While recovering from a parasite in the Himalayas, he wrote his first book, Surfing Life Waves, a personal development guide that uses the surfing experience as a metaphor for life.

Settling in New Zealand, Brad joined the Resilience Institute, where he served as partner and Head of Innovation, and, for a period, CEO. Immersed in resilience science, he delivered training to many of New Zealand's largest organisations, including Fletcher Building, Fonterra and the New Zealand Government. Directing both technology and brand, he rebuilt the Resilience Assessment, authored several global research reports, hosted the Resilience Podcast, and delivered work around the world for PwC, Shell, Electronic Arts, Bridgestone, Schindler and many more. His book Resilience Mastery (2020) is built on research into the skills that separate the most resilient people from the least.

In 2018 he founded the Values Institute, on the hypothesis that resilience and high performance benefit from a foundation of meaning and purpose. Its free Values App has been used by more than 50,000 people across 114 countries. In 2025 Start With Values was released globally, distributed by Penguin Random House; the same year, Brad was named a Leadership Luminary Top 50 honoree and founded FLAME, a workplace programme and live experience that weaves more than two decades of teaching, research and technology into a cohesive framework for human capacity, geared for a changing world. His Global Values Report followed in 2026: one of the largest studies on values ever released.

Today Brad speaks for organisations around the world, and it all comes back to one question: how do we stay human, and thrive, while technology changes almost everything? For workplaces, his answer is sustainable high performance: burn bright, not out. FLAME has been integrated into The Icehouse's OMP and LDP programmes and addresses the defining challenges of the age of intelligence: psychological safety, the meaning crisis, burnout, mental fitness and vitality. It is built on one big idea from neuroscience, that the brain is a prediction machine, and that we can reconnect with the present moment by regulating state and shifting our story. Brad pairs that science with the wisdom traditions that anticipated it, and increasingly with a little performance magic on stage, because nothing demonstrates the predictive brain like feeling your own predictions fail.