Simon Mainwaring

Leadership:
A. The “Virtuous Spiral” of Transcendent Business: How to Lead With We
You can grow your business even as you wholly commit to humanity and the planet—even during this unprecedented confluence of crises. In fact, relevance and long-term prosperity for your business will absolutely depend on it. How you get there is to Lead With We, starting at the top. In this session, Mainwaring lays out a radical reimagining and reengineering of business based on the idea of collectivized purpose. Using extensive case studies and proprietary data collated over a decade of work with top brands, global and local, he will show businesses large and small how the regenerative future of business is in our grasp. That future of life, work, and growth in which We, together, succeed in business while we restore and protect the social and living systems on which all of our futures depend.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:

1. How to drive business growth while solving today’s most pressing challenges.
2. How to ensure relevance and resonance with employees and customers.
3. How to leverage rising market forces to accelerate your growth and impact.

B. Collaborative Leadership: Mobilizing All Stakeholders to Transform Our Collective Future
The most successful leaders, like those at Starbucks, Home Depot, IKEA, Toyota, Avery Denison, and Marks & Spencer, are all modeling a new iteration of leadership. But so are legions of small businesses of every stripe. This “movement of movements” envisions and steers a simple but powerful vehicle of unprecedented hyper-alliance called Lead With We. In this session, Mainwaring demonstrates that you, too, can make a commitment to the kind of transformation top companies have achieved through unparalleled collaboration with every constituency. Employees, customers, consumers, partners, competitors, sectors, and beyond all working With one another to co-create, co-author, and co-own responsibility – and limitless opportunities – for improving the world, even as every boat rises, and business profits climb.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:

1. How to ensure you fully activate and embed your company purpose throughout your internal company culture.
2. How to mobilize a brand community to do your storytelling and advocacy with you.
3. How to collaborate on the highest levels—cross-sector and pre-competitively.

C-Suite Topics
A. Growth Leadership: Connecting the Dots Between Personal and Corporate Purpose
What’s your purpose and how are you executing it? Your business will survive only when its leaders define and effectively activate its core purpose. So, what do you do? What do you do best? Why does your company exist, and what role will it play in the world? Answers here will provide clear guidance for how your business acts with integrity of intent, the most effective way to inspire like minded people, thus sparking a values-driven movement that will grow your brand. In this session, Mainwaring shows you how first embedding your purpose across all departments, LOB’s, and your supply chain, and then effectively communicating it will be the best way you can rise above the actions or inactions of your competitors and the overall noise of the marketplace. It will also help steady you in a complex and fluid business landscape full of distractions—not to mention a confluence of crises that’s only worsening. Finally, clarity in your purpose will help sustain you personally through tough times: Entrepreneurship is hard, and it’s only the passion behind your purpose that will get you through inevitable difficulties.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:

1. The power of an authentically activated purpose, and how you leverage it.
2. How social good enterprises and startups are driven by a passionate purpose—and how they sustain momentum.
3. How leading brands combine personal and corporate purpose to drive growth and scale impact.

B. Tomorrow’s CEO: How to Lead in a Fast-Changing and Challenged World
After recent shocks and disorientation across the global economic landscape, a sudden and profound reckoning is now underway, one that can no longer be written off. It’s increasingly necessary to expand all our ideas about business’s role in making a better world—and that starts at the top. Only business has the reach, resources, and responsibility to respond at scale to the interrelated social, environmental, and global challenges we now face as a species. This “Next Normal” will be characterized by the co-existence of destabilizing challenges, with business positioned on the front line. And those companies that endure and prosper will be the ones with leaders who Lead With We—who accept and act on the fact that the world will continue to change for the worse if we continue with “business-as-usual.” A revolution is occurring among companies of all sizes, as they transform their core businesses, weave social and environmental responsibility deep into the fabric of their organizations, and reap rewards by elevating their brands far above competitors’ in the eyes of employees, customers, consumers, investors, the media, and Wall Street. Such firms are thinking longer term, acting more responsibly, becoming transparent and accountable, and collaborating in partnerships with other companies—even competitors—to foster a new, more creative mindset focused on addressing the social and environmental challenges we face, not as an afterthought of doing business, but as the very reason for it.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. How to attract top talent in a competitive marketplace, among new generations mostly guided by purpose and values.
2. How to market your company’s purpose along with its services or products without sounding pandering or self-congratulatory.
3. How to maintain your fiduciary responsibility to shareholders while living up to your moral responsibility as a human being on a planet in dire straits?

Change Management
A. Business Growth and Success Re-imagined: The Four C’s of How You Lead With We
A business’s success is commensurate with the strength of its community. Its purpose leads to impact on real problems beyond the P&L, then communicating that impact through effective storytelling. Therefore, its communication is purpose- and people centered, rather than transactional or self-serving. In this session, Mainwaring demonstrates how these efforts arise organically out of expressions of an acknowledgment of our interdependence, namely the presumption of Co-Ownership (We’re all in this together, meaning all stakeholders – including consumers – who co-own all brands, and thereby enable their success); the opportunity for Co-Authorship (meaning all business stakeholders – from CEO to consumers – get to define, align, and create the overall role and specific impact each brand and business can exercise); the practice of Co-creation (which entails all stakeholders creating together the actual content – the storytelling – and driving its impact); and the extension of all this through continual, effective collaboration with outside entities such as other companies, NPFs, and the public sector.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. How purpose can be employed in service of business objectives only with nonstop and comprehensive stakeholder engagement.
2. How to collaborate with your community without losing “control” of your business or brand.
3. How to effectively and meaningfully communicate your impact to various constituencies to drive business growth.

B. The New Business Normal: Restoring Relevance, Growth, and Impact Post-Covid
While the viral crisis the world is still suffering comes at an unaccountable human and economic cost, it seems also to have framed a doorway to a new, much-needed, more robust, equitable, and sustainable expression of capitalism, with a whole new brand identity that recognizes our shared responsibility. The widespread and devastating consequences of COVID-19 have forced heads of state, corporate leaders, and citizens alike to reconsider how they do business and live their lives, especially employing more and better social impact strategies. Here, the collective becomes the key factor in our business decision filter. That starts with all the local stakeholders in our enterprise, incorporates our partners, expands into the communities we serve, grows to influence the larger culture, and always considers the environment and planet along the way. In this session, Mainwaring will demonstrate how, emerging from this crisis of tragic proportions, we find ourselves at a threshold of a way forward that better serves all stakeholders and our planet. A pathway that secures a safer and more advantageous future for more – and ideally, all – of us.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. How to recalibrate your ideas about “success” and “growth.”
2. How real companies measure their impact on real people and pressing problems in the real world—often in real time.
3. How to prepare for the next (inevitable) crisis.

Crisis Management
A. Brands As “First Responders:” The New Mandate for Business Growth
If the recent twin crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and the social justice protests taught us anything, it’s that business finds itself in the trenches and on the frontlines of social, cultural, and global challenges. The economy lives or dies on how responsibly, nimbly, and thoroughly business responds to the world outside its doors and domains, beyond its industry and customer base. In a hypercompetitive market, new generations of workers are much more aware, engaged, and demanding of their companies. In this session, Mainwaring reviews global enterprises, as well as smaller companies, whose employees have responded immediately and directly to crises while simultaneously brand-building. You, too, can all but “future-proof” your business by embracing a “First Responder” mindset and practice. This is the new normal for businesses big and small for the foreseeable future, in which We together create a more responsible stakeholder-owned capitalism, and a more just and equitable society—even as we turn a continued profit.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. How – and why – to put the health and well-being of people and the planet before profit—yet still grow your company.
2. How to strategize real time scenarios to protect your business and support others.
3. How to partner in new ways to scale your response and impact.

B. Steady in a Storm: How to Build Your Brand in the Face of Multiple Crises
Business leaders are uniquely positioned to effect real, positive change on behalf of the world’s constituents, even as they uncover or develop innovative new ways to simultaneously grow their companies, industries, and the economy as a whole. Even during this time of unprecedented upheaval. Environmental catastrophe, infrastructural atrophy, and a host of other societal ills, some of which can prove ultimately fatal, face business leaders every day. Now everything – our entire way of life, including democracy itself – is at stake if we continue with a persistent Me First mindset. In this session, Mainwaring will argue the only way business can survive is by collectivizing all the social impact strategies and branding so many of us have been practicing, and rebrand capitalism itself. That starts with all of us, in alignment with our unique company purpose, products, industry, and expertise, working to better the whole.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. How to understand the state of the world as an opportunity for regeneration—not a burden.
2. How leading businesses, big and small, are responding to crises, bettering the world, and turning a profit.
3. How to transparently and effectively communicate your efforts and impact to a skeptical and weary public.

Purpose & Movement Building
A. Success Secrets of Today’s Most Purposeful and Impactful Brands
To Lead With We is literally the only way companies remain relevant, make money, and shore up the well-being of society and the planet that makes business possible. Why business? Because only business has the resources, reach, and responsibility to right decades if not centuries of inattention and avarice. Market forces – consumer expectations, employee demographics, increased (social) media scrutiny, regulations, and even rapidly shifting attitudes and behaviors among investors – are all demanding business gets busy redefining “growth” and “success” to encompass all stakeholders, all the “shareholders” in our collective future. Because brands can’t survive in societies that fail. In this session, Mainwaring demonstrates why businesses that continue to thrive despite today’s confluence of crises are those whose leaders best Lead With We: Although their business purpose will take on a novel expression based on their passions, expertise, and industries, it is interwoven in this new conception. They do the same thing, but in different ways. They all serve the collective good. They allow all stakeholders – employees, consumers, partners, etc. – a role in co-authoring and co-creating their brand. And most partner formally with others to accelerate and scale marketplace adoption and impact. They all play roles in business movements that shape culture and regenerate living and social systems.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. How to avoid purpose-washing, greenwashing, and other fatal mistakes so you can deliver and grow a credible brand movement.
2. How to foster a collaborative and productive company culture .
3. How companies large and small scale up their impact, and in so doing drive and sustain growth.

B. Movement-Making: Turning Your Brand into A High Growth Movement
Collaborative engagement and storytelling strategies activate purpose both inside and outside of your business walls, launching legitimate and meaningful movements with maximum and measurable impact, thus changing your communities for the better. In this session, Mainwaring shows how building a high-growth and high-impact movement requires the co-creation of a brand community. The keyword there is “co-create.” We make a commitment in which the brand and its internal stakeholders participate with others – starting with its customers – on an equal footing. We work on ways to mobilize all stakeholders associated with our brands. We build a community that willingly and voluntarily acts as an extension of our marketing department in the same way that everyone from leadership, employees, and partners promote and extend our brand. Customers, consumers, and the media can contribute to creating and expanding our brand community. Brand loyalists will become key ambassadors for our products, services, and impact because they fully understand – and with our help, believe in, subscribe to, and embody – the greater purpose we share with them, and the impact we create together.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. How to move from marketing to movement making, advertising to advocacy.
2. How – and why – to join an extant movement—and how you can help its stated goals.
3. How B2B and B2C companies built their brand movements—and what you can learn from them.

Work Wellness
A. Learning from Nature: Fostering Health and Wellness within the Office Ecosystem
Each year scientists discover more details about the myriad ways that nature is sustainable because of its regenerative and circular dynamics. And every year more companies emulate nature in their structure, processes, and procedures. They understand that “growth” and “success” – personal, business, brand, cultural – must be considered similarly symbiotic, aimed at achieving sufficiency for all. In this session, Mainwaring introduces models of, and a prescription for, achieving vitality, solidarity, mutualism, homeostasis, compassion, healing, diversity, and adaptability in the “life support system” of your business culture.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. What “biomimicry” and “geomimicry” mean and how they apply to regenerative business systems and employee well-being.
2. How to conduct an honest employee well-being audit and respond appropriately.
3. How to support employee health and wellness effectively while maintaining an equally healthy bottom line.

B. DI&E in Action: Building Teams and Culture that Authentically Lead With We
The most successful companies today, whether humble or huge, craft alliances in service of societal changes. They ask: “How wide is this We we’re working With here?
How representative is it?” This watershed moment carries a vast opportunity for a
new breed of corporate-guided societal leadership, starting with a higher bar for
DI&E efforts. In this session, Mainwaring will show how this requires social movements, cultural conversions, and systemic change. The next generation leaders of DI&E are earning the trust of their communities by taking a stand against racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and ableism. They’re invested in addressing the root causes of racial inequality to earn or retain that trust. To pioneer a paradigm shift in the role corporate entities play in advancing meaningful racial equity and social justice, these companies clarify what constitutes impact with ownable and enduring key performance indicators.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. How global business case studies demonstrate clear increases in market share, innovation, productivity, and reputation when companies accelerate DI&E outcomes.
2. How racial equity is an economic imperative, with $2.6 trillion of additional spending waiting to get unlocked by closing the racial earnings gap.
3. How – and why – diversity is a key ingredient in business growth, innovation and relevance to our future.

Technology & Innovation
A. Urgency and Optimism: How Business Meets Today’s Challenges with Equal Speed and Force
The undeniable failure of our ecological ecosystem will continue to ravage humanity, erode business viability, and cost literal lives—it already has. Meantime, the gaps in wealth, education, and healthcare can’t yawn any wider without swallowing whole swaths of humanity. Given the urgency and sheer scale of our challenges, it’s easy for all of us to get overwhelmed, pessimistic, or skeptical. But in this session, Mainwaring introduces those businesses that Lead With We, collaborating with tens of millions of collective employees, customers, consumers, supply chain partners, investors, and movements, all acting as multipliers of collective impact on critical environmental, social, and economic crises around the world. Leading companies, large and small, are thriving, unlocking new revenue-generating prospects from the estimated $12 trillion opportunity in unlocking responses to the SDGs and wider ESG needs.

In this session, attendees will learn:
1. How our major problems are interwoven, and addressing one will help ameliorate another.
2. How to unlock the power of the collective to respond to the environmental “Code Red.”
3. How to inspire optimism and urgency among your key stakeholders to solve compounding crises, while driving business growth and innovation by doing so.

B. Innovation Unlock: Accelerating Growth and Impact through a Lead With We Mindset
Purpose, innovation, and culture are all intertwined. They are the engine of every business, and should inform all departments of our company, our product and service development, partnerships, strategy, R&D—everything. In this session, Mainwaring shows us how to foster and sustain a culture and practice of innovation. First, companies and brands with a strong sense of purpose are able to transform and innovate better. Second, internal cultures must be liberated from oppressive leadership styles and motivate all of us to think long and hard about, then respond creatively to, real-world problems. Third, the most diverse companies tend to be the most innovative. Fourth, innovation works ideally when products or services become enablers of impact, serving as material expressions of purpose with net positive impact in a closed-loop, regenerative ecosystem.

In this session, attendees will learn:
1. How the nature and products of innovation must evolve to meet the expectations and challenges of new generations.
2. The three pivot points for innovation and business transformation: visionary leadership, response to consumer or media criticism, and looming threats on the horizon.
3. How simply doing less harm and more good is no longer enough, and how to innovate toward the transformative.

Women in Leadership:
A. Consciousness is Contagious: What Today’s Top Women CEOs Are Teaching Us About Leadership
In this session, Mainwaring introduces five CEOs who exemplify leadership, and explores to what extent their gender might have anything to do with their success. In 2021, Karen Lynch took over as CEO of CVS Health, ranked No. 7 on the Global 500—she’s the highest-ranking female CEO in the world. Roz Brewer, formerly of Starbucks and Walmart, became CEO of the Walgreens Boots Alliance. As CEO of Citigroup, Jane Fraser is the first woman to run a major Wall Street bank. Former JPMorgan Chase executive Thasunda Brown Duckett became CEO of the retirement fund manager TIAA—she’s one of six women of color running Global 500 companies. And Véronique Penchienati-Bosetta became the interim co-CEO of French food business Danone, a special case of collaboration worthy of exploration.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. How these CEOs envision our future and the new expectations of leadership.
2. How these leaders frame their respective responses to a market facing multiple, concurrent crises.
3. Young entrepreneurs setting the pace for innovation, collaboration, and industry transformation—and how to emulate them.

B. Empowering Women: Nurturing the Next Generation of Leaders Our World Desperately Needs
We ought to be long into a “post-sexist” world—but we’re far from it. Less than five percent of CEOs in the S&P 500 list are women. That’s only 23 out of five hundred. And in the US, women-owned firms make up less than 20 percent of all companies that employ people. What’s the key to balancing out this gross inequity? We must confront cultural stereotypes that disempower women in the workplace and beyond. We must feature real women in our storytelling. We must treat women equitably in the workplace. In this session, Mainwaring invites the audience to consider women’s massive impact and purchasing power, and the various social and political movements underway that will change the business landscape dramatically, even as more women entrepreneurs, CEOs, board members, and other leaders gain more access and more traction.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. Global companies most aggressively confronting and overcoming outdated female cultural stereotypes—and why that matters.
2. How consumers view your business not taking a stand on women’s rights as complicit in a major problem.
3. Smaller companies with effective mentoring programs for women or actively supporting and promoting women entrepreneurs across the globe—and how to emulate them.

Sustainability / ESG
A. ESG at Work: Integrating and Activating Commitments To Actively Build Your Business
About a third of all major companies are ESG rated; and more have adopted ESG metrics—at least for their public facing communications. But some recent, controversial research points out potential flaws in the “ESG outperformance narrative.” Without a doubt, ESG reporting can and must evolve—a process well underway and accelerating. Our ability to leverage and scale the accountability that such (honest, thorough, and transparent) reporting provides turns on the universal adoption of stricter and more consistent metrics, benchmarks, and goals. That will help prevent the likely greenwashing of many companies and funds that have rebranded themselves through opportunistic marketeering with an ESG halo. All stakeholders must remain vigilant about mere virtue signaling from some ESG talk, as our collective future is at stake. In this session, Mainwaring will explore why manufacturers, suppliers, retailers, and distributors must now align their product and service offerings to the ESG issues of most concern to their consumers and the public at large to drive industry upgrades, challenge competitors to do better, and hold themselves publicly accountable—in order to bolster business growth.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. How to use tools to discover ESG impact in every step of your supply chain.
2. How to incorporate fulfillment of ESG goals into KPI-based executive compensation plans—and why this matters.
3. How investors can better develop and communicate impact metrics and build a sustainable, and defensible, portfolio.

B. Beyond Sustainability Storytelling: Defining and Sharing a Narrative that Captures Attention
Forward-thinking companies consistently review and transparently communicate progress across the breadth of all their internal activations, including ESG metrics, DI&E efforts, and community impact—but often only through the lens of their relative adherence to “sustainability” benchmarks. But is this enough? Is “sustainability” even enough, given the urgency and enormity of our interrelated crises? In this session, Mainwaring will argue that it’s clear that sustainability as we’ve come to understand it does not go far enough. Nature isn’t naturally “sustainable,” but rather, regenerative. As stakeholders continue their transformation from an individual “Me” into one equipped to Lead a larger We toward a regenerative future, we must craft a narrative that inspires restoration and renewal. Then we must stress-test, self-disrupt, and continuously iterate and adapt that narrative and associated practices.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. How large companies, such as Nestlé, Walmart, and P&G, are telling stories of circular, regenerative, and net positive systems and impacts.
2. How small but growing companies are participating—and which are telling the most effective and emotionally resonant stories about regeneration.
3. How regeneration encompasses a spectrum from clean and renewable energy to fair and just human relations, and how different companies are activating it.

Consumer / Sales
A. The Age of Agency: A New Vision for Stakeholder Capitalism
Brands must now think of themselves as leading a multi-stakeholder, participatory movement that addresses issues that elevate humanity (transformative). While the viral, humanitarian, and environmental crises the world is still suffering from, come at tragic human and economic cost, they seem also to have framed a doorway to a new, much-needed, more robust, equitable, and sustainable definition of sales and expression of capitalism. In this session, Mainwaring introduces this new brand identity of our dominant economic paradigm: We First Capitalism, already in practice by some of the world’s top-selling companies. Because if we’re to avoid continued environmental catastrophe, infrastructural collapse, and a host of other societal ills, we must collectivize the social impact strategies and purposeful branding so many of us have been practicing of late, to reengineer capitalism so that it better serves all stakeholders.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. How and why capitalism is evolving to better serve business, society and the planet.
2. How each stakeholder in your value chain plays an active and impactful role.
3. How individual and collective efforts aggregate to accelerate and scale business growth and social impact.

B. Show Up, Stand Up, Speak Up: How to Rise Above the Noise of Purposeful Brands
Do you think businesses can best weather social, economic, environmental, and political storms by staying out of the rain? The climate emergency is demolishing corporate supply chains. Generations are being born with anxiety, depression, and hopelessness about the fate of their future. We’re in the midst of a global health crisis. Consumers nowadays expect companies to take a stand, even if the issue is highly politicized. But not with empty platitudes. In this session, Mainwarings shows how the most dangerous thing a company can do is try to play safe. We only alienate loyalists on both sides of any issue, and risk atrophying hard-won reputation capital that can take us years to recover. So, instead, companies must take a stand. But on what issues? How vocal should you be? And at what risk to your brand?

In this presentation, attendees will learn:
1. How brands, big and small, responded to COVID, gun control, abortion, immigration, and social justice movements—and what we can learn from them.
2. The three biggest mistakes companies make in taking their stands to the public, and how to avoid them.
3. How you can join an existing movement already underway—and build your business, reputation and impact by doing so.