Cultural Strategist | Leadership Architect | DEI Reformer | Author | Advocate | Human Connector
I’ve never lived a linear life ( Thank Goodness) and that’s my greatest strength.
My work is built on lived experience, not textbook theory. My leadership comes from what I’ve navigated, not what I’ve memorised. And everything I bring into organisations today is born from a lifetime of understanding people, culture, belonging, identity, and what it truly means to be seen.
I’m Marcus: a neurodiverse, people-led, globally experienced culture strategist who has spent more than two decades helping organisations evolve beyond box-ticking, beyond fear, and beyond limitation into workplaces where people can breathe, think, contribute, and thrive.
My journey began far from boardrooms, strategy decks, and keynote stages.
School wasn’t built for me or my dyslexic brain, but I knew the world was.
I learned early how to read people, not pages.
How to solve problems in real time.
How to communicate with clarity, creativity, and compassion, especially when navigating systems that didn’t make space for me.
I worked in special needs education, LGBTQ+ advocacy, community leadership, government panels, corporate consulting, media, and cultural change. I sit on multiple boards, I’ve stepped into rooms where people were resistant, frightened, exhausted, hopeful, or unsure, and helped them build new understanding, new language, and new pathways forward.
My career has been a mosaic: Entertainment, media, presenter & producer, Leadership retreat designer and facilitator, Advisor to local government and global organisations, Creator of frameworks used across UK universities, Champion for inclusive language and psychological safety, Corporate strategist, consultant, and coach
Every chapter taught me something about people and every lesson now shapes the work I deliver to organisations across the world.
For a quarter of a century, I also worked as a pioneering drag queen, long before drag was safe and celebrated mainstream. Drag taught me more about leadership, presence, resilience, and communication than any formal training ever could.
Because if you can hold the attention of a packed Working Men’s Club…
If you can read a room in seconds…
If you can turn tension into laughter, silence into applause, and strangers into a community…
You can walk into any boardroom with grounded confidence and emotional intelligence.
Drag trained me to: Set the scene, command space, read energy instantly, connect people, build belonging, navigate conflict gracefully, tell stories that shift perspectives
This lived experience threads through everything I do, because culture is performance, but not in a fake way. Culture is how people feel when they’re in the room.
My work blends emotional intelligence, neuroscience, and human behaviour to show leaders why belonging changes performance at a biological level.
When people feel safe, supported, and recognised, their brain shifts into forward movement, innovation, collaboration, retention, and growth.
When they don’t, the system collapses.
I help organisations build cultures where people’s nervous systems settle enough to do their best thinking and their best work.
I’ve written two books on inclusive language and belonging, both used across education, business, and community sectors.
My work is stocked in university libraries across the UK and used by:
London Business School’s, Leadership courses, New social worker training programmes, Emerging entrepreneurship groups
My next chapter, centred around the rebrand of DEI into R’D.E.B.I, is already generating excitement across sectors.
DEI needed saving and reshaping.
It was losing its meaning, becoming politicised, weaponized, diluted, and misunderstood.
I redesigned it from the ground up:
R’D.E.B.I = Representation. Diversity. Equity. Belonging. Inclusion.
A global reboot built for modern organisations.
A human-first model that recognises DEI affects everyone, not a select group.
A psychologically aligned framework that restores trust, clarity, and purpose.
Today, R’D.E.B.I is being adopted by organisations in the US, UK, Europe, and Australia, reshaping culture with dignity, intelligence, and heart.
My mission is to make workplaces kinder, braver, smarter, and more human.
To help leaders lead with clarity.
To help teams build cultures where belonging isn’t a luxury, but the baseline.
To ensure every organisation becomes a space where people don’t just survive, they evolve.
I believe change doesn’t come from policies alone.
It comes from conversation, understanding, courage…
and from leaders willing to build the future instead of repeating the past.
