Simon Mainwaring | Speaker Profile
Simon Mainwaring is a brand futurist, speaker, author, podcaster, and columnist. He’s a Real Leaders’ Top 50 Keynote Speaker in the World, MOMENTUM Top 100 Impact CEO, Featured Expert and Jury Member at the Cannes Lions Festival and U.S. One Show for Sustainable Development, and Thinkers360 Top 50 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers on Climate Change. He is the founder/CEO of We First, an award-winning, strategic consultancy building purpose, sustainability, and climate initiatives for brands. He also hosts the influential Lead With We podcast and is a columnist for the CMO Network in Forbes.
Featured keynote topics
Simon Mainwaring is happy to tailor a speech for your event. His most popular topics are:
Leadership
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: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: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: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.
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: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: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.
Speaker background
Simon Mainwaring’s latest book, Lead With We: The Business Revolution that Will Save Our Future is a Wall Street Journal bestseller. It was voted McKinsey Top Business Bestseller on Workplace & Culture; #2 Best Business Book of the Year by Forbes; an AXIOM Gold Medalist in the Leadership category; Official Nominee for The Next Big Idea; and a finalist for the International Business Book of the Year.
His previous book, We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World is a New York Times- & Wall Street Journal bestseller. It was named an Amazon Top Ten Business Book; 800CEORead Top Five Marketing Book; Best Business Marketing Book of the Year by strategy+business; & one of the Top Sustainability Books of the decade by Sustainable Brands.
Simon hosts the “Lead With We” podcast, in which he dives deep with business leaders about how brands survive crises, thrive in fast-changing markets, and drive growth through a challenging future. He also writes a column for Forbes.com as a longtime contributor to its CMO Network.
Simon was ranked among Real Leaders magazine’s “Top 50 Keynote Speakers in the World,” was voted a “Top 5 Marketing Speaker” by speaking.com, and was featured on the cover of the National Speaker’s Magazine.
Simon’s been a Jury Member for the One Show for Sustainable Development and Jury Member at the Cannes Lions Festival for the Sustainable Development Goals, as well as a Featured Expert Speaker. He was ranked by Real Leaders magazine as a Top 100 Visionary Leader, a Momentum Top 100 Impact CEO, and his company, We First, was a Real Leaders’ Top 100 Impact Companies in the U.S. and B Corp ‘Best For The World’ honoree.
Simon acted as interim CMO at TOMS in 2015. In that same year, he was a finalist for Global Australian of the Year.
Organizations and event organizers can confidently hire this speaker to conduct keynotes and workshops about future trends across a diverse range of topics and in the following formats:
| Format | Description |
|---|---|
| Advisory calls | Discussion with your executives to answer specific questions on a topic, project or subject of choice. |
| Executive coaching | One-to-one coaching and mentoring session between an executive and the selected speaker. Topics are mutually agreed upon. |
| Topic presentation (Internal) | A presentation for your internal team based on a mutually agreed topic with content supplied by the speaker. This format is designed specifically for internal team meetings. Maximum 25 participants. |
| Webinar presentation (Internal) | Webinar presentation for your team members on a mutually agreed topic, including question time. Internal replay rights included. Maximum 100 participants. |
| Webinar presentation (External) | Webinar presentation for your team and external attendees on a mutually agreed topic. Question time and external replay rights included. Maximum 500 participants. |
| Event keynote presentation | Keynote or speaking engagement for your corporate event. Topic and content can be customized to event themes. Includes one-on-one question time and participation in other event sessions if required. |
Book this speaker
Contact us to inquire about booking this speaker for a keynote, panel, or workshop, or contact Kaelah Shimonov at kaelah.s@quantumrun.com
