Lead With We Is Back With NEW Episodes!
Feb 15, 2021
Lead With We is back for Season 2 with new episodes every Tuesday! And to kick things off, I’m sharing my thoughts on 2021 so far. Things got off to a rocky start in January, but there are many reasons to be optimistic when it comes to the future of business, the planet and society. And that’s really what this show is about. I’m also sharing a bit about the amazing guests we have lined up for you this season. Together we’ll discover how to re-engineer business to be a force for positive change in 2021 and beyond.
Guest Bio
Simon Mainwaring, Founder & CEO, We First
Simon Mainwaring is the founder and CEO of We First, a strategic consultancy that accelerates growth and impact for purpose-driven brands. He is a member of the Advisory Council of Conscious Capitalism LA, the Advisory Board of Sustainable Brands, The Forbes Business Council, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London.
Simon was a finalist for Global Australian of the Year in 2015 and interim CMO at TOMS, received the MAKE CHANGE, ‘Conscious Leadership’ Award for 2016, a finalist for the Conscious Company Leadership Awards in 2017, and a Real Leaders Top 100 Visionary Leader in 2018. His company We First was included in Real Leaders list for the Top 100 Impact Companies in the United States for 2018 and a We First was a B Corps ‘Best for The World’ Honoree in 2019. He is a Jury Member of PRWeek’s ‘Purpose Awards’ in 2020 and a Jury Member at the Cannes Lions Festival for the Sustainable Development Goals in 2021.
Simon’s book, We First: How brands and consumers use social media to build a better world is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Amazon bestseller. It was named an Amazon Top Ten Business Book, 800CEORead Top Five Marketing Book, strategy+business named it the Best Business Marketing Book of the Year, and Simon also authors of the popular ‘Purpose At Work’ blog in Forbes.
Simon is a sought after international speaker with engagements including the Cannes International Advertising Festival, Royal Society of Arts, SXSW, TEDxSF, NAB, Promaxbda, Conscious Capitalism, Necker Island with Sir Richard Branson, Aspen Institute, Sustainable Brands, SOCAP, 3BL, Social Good Summit, National Speakers Association, 1440 Multiversity, National Press Club, Harvard, USC, UCLA and the United Nations Foundation. He has delivered keynotes at Google, Coca-Cola, General Motors, VF, Samsung, VSP Global, Toyota, SAP, Gucci, JP Morgan Chase, Timberland, VW Group, the NHL, and Patagonia. He has presented at the Harvard Business School Association, UCLA, USC, University of Oregon and University of Chicago. He was voted a Top 5 Marketing Speaker by speaking.com for 5 years in a row and featured on the cover of the National Speaker’s Magazine.
Prior to starting We First Simon spent 15 years as an award-winning writer, Creative Director, and Worldwide Creative Director at many of the world’s top creative advertising agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi, Wieden & Kennedy, and Ogilvy working on brands such a Nike, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and Motorola, and received over 60 awards at major advertising festivals including the Cannes Advertising Festival, the One Show, the British Design & Art Direction Awards, among others.
Transcription
Simon Mainwaring:
From We First and Goal 17 Media, welcome to LEAD WITH WE, the podcast where top business leaders and founders reveal how they build their companies to be high impact and high growth by putting We First. I’m Simon Mainwaring, and this episode marks the start of a brand new season of LEAD WITH WE. If you joined us in season one, thank you for your time, for your attention, for your wonderful feedback. And if you’re new to season two, welcome. We have some truly amazing guests coming up on season two who’ll be talking about the future of business, and frankly, the future of humanity.
Simon Mainwaring:
But I want to kick off this new season by sharing some of my thoughts on 2021 so far, because as we all sit back and reflect after such a difficult year, it’s easy to be disheartened, it’s easy to think, “Wow, is it going to be any better?” But there is cause for optimism, and let me just give you a few reasons. Firstly, the United States has reentered the Paris Climate Accord, which is a really important step in getting global participation in and around addressing the climate emergency, which is going to affect all our lives in different ways over the years to come.
Simon Mainwaring:
Also, it was incredibly encouraging to see 3,000 plus people come together, world leaders, business leaders, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and they all aligned around this idea of stake holder capitalism. What does that mean? Well, for a long time, the focus of capitalism has been shareholders; how much money do you return to those shareholders that invest in your business? But now because of climate, because of loss of biodiversity, because of all the challenges that that causes, they’ve woken up to the need to embrace stakeholder capitalism, which includes, yes, investors, but also employees and suppliers and customers and consumers and citizens, and most importantly, the planet, so that we can all work together to everyone’s benefit.
Simon Mainwaring:
And then a third reason to be optimistic. Larry Fink, the CEO of the largest money management firm in the world, came out with his fourth annual letter. And in this letter, he really stated that no company, no matter who you are, can avoid the rising demands to be responsible, to be transparent around your environmental, social, and governance metrics, which is how these big companies demonstrate the positive impact that they’re having; how are they impacting the environment? How are they helping to solve for social issues? And how are they running their business internally?
Simon Mainwaring:
And he also said that all companies need to commit to a net zero economy, which is really all about making sure that we limit global warming to below two degrees, because anything above two degrees is really going to compromise all our lives in very serious ways. So three great reasons to start feeling optimistic as 2021 unfolds. I’m also super excited about the guests that we’re going to be sharing with you, all their insights, all their learnings, all their practices, so that you can apply them to your business.
Simon Mainwaring:
For example, Sally Uren, who’s the CEO of Forum for the Future, who’ll be laying out for us four different versions of what the future can look like and how we must work together to make sure that we have the most positive one unfold. Or Andrei Cherny, who’s the co-founder and CEO of Aspiration, which is a truly disruptive financial services company taking on the banking world. And also Anthea Kelsick, who’s the co-CEO of B Lab in US and Canada, which is this global movement to create a new way of doing business that’s going to benefit everyone.
Simon Mainwaring:
And the reason we invite such guests on to LEAD WITH WE is to serve you with the best insights, the best content to empower you to not only grow your business, but to scale your impact, because here’s the truth about 2021 as we look forward. We can’t go back to business as usual and we really need to rewrite the entire business narrative to that end, because as soon as we think about the role of business in new ways, we will start to act in new ways that translate that intention into action. And that doesn’t mean we need to abandon capitalism. In fact, quite the opposite.
Simon Mainwaring:
We just need to recognize that the way that we’ve been practicing capitalism and business more broadly has really been compromising our future. And that’s why I’m so excited to share all these guests in season two with you, because they’re going to show us how to do it, what actually works, what actions we need to take to build our businesses and improve our future. And so, tune in for the new episodes each week, because this isn’t something we do alone. It’s something we do with each other, for each other. So thanks for joining us for season two and I’ll see you on the next episode of LEAD WITH WE.
Simon Mainwaring:
Thanks for joining us for another episode and a brand new season of LEAD WITH WE. Our show is produced by Goal 17 Media and we release new episodes every Tuesday. Make sure you subscribe to LEAD WITH WE on Apple, Google, or Spotify, and please recommend it to your friends and colleagues so they too can build purposeful and profitable businesses. And if you’d like to learn more about purposeful branding, check out wefirstbranding.com where we have lots of free resources and case studies. Thanks for listening and let’s all LEAD WITH WE.
