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Guest Name
Simon Mainwaring
Simon Mainwaring
Guest Occupation
Founder & CEO of We First, on Forbes Business Council and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Guest Biography

SIMON MAINWARING

Simon Mainwaring is the founder & CEO of We First, a strategic consultancy accelerating growth and impact for purpose-driven brands, and author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller LEAD WITH WE: The Business Revolution That Will Save Our Future. He’s a member of the Steering Committee of Sustainable Brands, the Forbes Business Council and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His first book, We First was a New York Times bestseller and named Best Marketing Book of the Year by strategy+business. He hosts the Lead With We podcast.

For far too long, businesses have operated with a dog-eat-dog mentality where the winner takes all. Yet over the past year and a half, through the social, political, economic, and environmental upheaval we’ve all experienced, this way of conducting business has proven not only futile, but irresponsible. Society is ready for, and desperately in need of, a revolutionary new way to run our businesses to preserve our future.

For us, together, to bring about real, lasting changes, we will all need to learn to operate as an interdependent collective rather than as opposing forces. It is time we stop leading with “me” and start leading with “We.”

The market is increasingly disrupted, the economy is only beginning to heal, consumers are more and more conscious, and the constellation of crises facing the world continues to compound. To help solve all of these interconnected challenges, Simon Mainwaring has developed a revolutionary blueprint for creating lasting business growth through impact in his new book, LEAD WITH WE: The Business Revolution That Will Save Our Future (Matt Holt Books, November 9, 2021).

As CEO and founder of We First, and author of the 2011 New York Times bestseller We First, Mainwaring is one of the world’s leading thinkers on leveraging the reach, resources, and unique responsibility of business to improve company cultures, the communities it serves, our society at large, and the planet on which all of our futures depend.

Equipped with a decade of research and hands-on experience as a key partner in some of the most impactful brand revolutions at companies such as Timberland, TOMS, SAP, Avery Dennison, VSP Global, VF Corporation, etc., Mainwaring reveals a critical blueprint for CEOs, top executives, entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and all stakeholders in our collective future to pivot their thinking, behaviors, and impact, and to repurpose business as the vanguard of meaningful change before it’s too late.