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Photo Credit: Brett Gundlock for The Wall Street Journal

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What can a 20-something Tunisian medical intern teach senior managers at KPMG LLP?

A lot, apparently.

Skander M’zah, a doctor who participated in the 2010-2011 Tunisian revolution, was one of about a dozen speakers featured at the accounting firm’s October 500-strong new-partner meeting in New Delhi. The topics of Mr. M’zah’s speech included lessons learned during Tunisia’s political turmoil and how to mentally prepare for change.

Companies have long hired motivational speakers and business “gurus” to address employee audiences. But lately, fueled by demand for a more tangible return on investment and boredom with the regular speaker circuit, event planners are tapping CEOs, historians, and even fighter pilots, to offer a fresh take on topics such as crisis management and corporate culture.

Big-name experts on the economy feature prominently in a new ranking of influential business thinkers compiled for The Wall Street Journal. To see the list on At Work, please click here.

The shift has been accelerated by growing fervor for TED talks, a conference series featuring short addresses from multiple academics, politicians and executives. Inspired by the enthusiasm surrounding such talks, KPMG staged its meeting as a TEDx event, under the TED umbrella but independently organized.

“It’s not just telling someone else to go out and do something,” says David Lavin, whose Lavin Agency represents the founders of Kiva and ING Direct, neuroscientists and politicians, among others. “[Speakers] are saying, ‘Look what I’m doing. It’s pretty cool. What are you doing?’ ”

Construction company Skanska AB’s SKA-B.SK U.S. arm held its annual management meeting in Phoenix in March, just as the 430 senior executives and high-potential employees were about to implement a new strategy that had been several years in the planning.

So the firm hired two former fighter pilots to discuss the steps needed to successfully execute a mission, including how to define a project, analyze progress, celebrate success and debrief at the end.

Jim O’Shea, senior vice president and chief administrator at Skanska USA, wanted to ramp up the level of introspection among staff as the company embarked on its new direction.

Plus, seeing the high-energy, uniformed pilots “really [woke] everybody up.”

It’s hard to quantify the impact an outside speaker can have on a group of employees. But one way around that has been to create agendas that look more like “how-to guides” that yield tangible and immediate results beyond just motivating people.

In April, 150 staffers from the marketing team at liquor company Beam Inc. met in Los Angeles for a biannual conference. To kick off the three-day event, Beam hired The Moth, a group of professional storytellers best known for a weekly public radio broadcast.

“They are the best at teaching people how to tell better stories,” says Chief Marketing Officer Kevin George. And with just a few seconds or minutes to convey messages about brands including Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark, Beam’s stories need to be sharp.

The Moth team broke down the structure of a story, pointing out why certain parts were compelling, and then had Beam staffers tell tales to one another.

Mr. George says that the prior conference, which included an address about millennials by advertising executives, wasn’t as interesting.

Mr. George declined to say how much Beam spent on the April event, but says the payoff was obvious. Company representatives met to discuss new-product innovation in May, and rather than just discuss the product’s function, Mr. George says they asked one another, “What’s the story that goes with this product? How do we tell consumers?”

And firms seem willing to pay the price, shelling out tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for each speaker. But Mr. Lavin says the money is minimal in the context of pulling high-salaried executives away from their work for multiple days. And he says that one good idea can pay for itself “very, very quickly.”

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Melissa Korn writes about higher education for The Wall Street Journal, with a special focus on business schools. Her coverage areas include undergraduate and graduate admissions and financial aid, academics and administrative news at schools worldwide. To contact her directly, please click here.