Simon Mainwaring

Every company today faces increased pressure from consumers, employees, and investors to make a positive difference. By leveraging Conscious Capitalism, your company can engage all stakeholders to build your business with you. In this speech, Simon Mainwaring, founder/CEO of We First and New York Times bestselling author, will share the strategies and tactics that make this possible. Based on a decade of experience in the Conscious Capitalism movement, he will reveal how purpose drives profit and sets you up for growth even in challenging times.

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.

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?

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.

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.