Ryo Penna is a researcher and facilitator of organizational conversations who works with CEOs and executive teams around the world.

As a global consultant at Conversant, an American firm specialized in conversations and organizational performance for over thirty years, Ryo has supported leadership teams at companies such as Unilever, DHL, Motorola, HP, Danone, Franklin Templeton, and The Nature Conservancy, across nineteen countries on four continents, in Portuguese, English, and Spanish.

As a speaker, Ryo has addressed audiences as varied as Amcham's CEO Forum, shared the stage with Peter Senge on The Future of Leadership panel at Earth's Call, at the Aspen Institute, and gave the TEDx talk The Wisdom of Questions. He hosts the podcast Escuta Primeiro, where he explores subjects that, obviously or not, shape the way leaders act, and wrote The Art of Prompting (2026), a book about the art of asking well, of an AI, of a person, and of yourself, published in Portuguese and English.

Before Conversant, Ryo cofounded and was CEO of Grupo Anga, a holding whose companies included the culture consultancy Tribo, the recruiting firm Eureca, and the publisher of MIT Sloan Management Review Brasil and HSM Management. Before that, he led leadership development at Fundação Estudar, reaching 1,500 participants in a single year and creating the School of Facilitators.

His career began at university in the Junior Enterprise Movement, where he was president of Brasil Júnior (the Brazilian Confederation of Junior Enterprises), leading a movement of twenty thousand students, helping to pass the Junior Enterprise Law through the Senate's Constitution and Justice Committee, and creating the movement's first global forum, in Geneva, with leaders from sixteen countries, the origin of today's Junior Enterprises Global. The impact of his leadership in the movement was recorded as a chapter in DreamMakers, by Michele Hunt.

He holds a degree in Business Administration from UFJF and a master's in Global Prosperity from University College London, where he researched how interpersonal skills generate prosperity for people, companies, and countries.