Mike Penrose - CEO at The Sustainability Group

Today's guest is Mike Penrose, Founder @ The Sustainability Group (@PenroseMike)

Mike is Founder and Chief Executive of the Sustainability Group. 

Mike set up the Sustainability Group to make sustainability and social purpose a core part of how businesses and investors plan for the future. 

Mike currently advises a number of large businesses, family offices, sporting organizations and financial institutions on how to make sustainability and social purpose an integral part of their business and investment strategies.

Their goal at The Sustainability Group is to bring to life a word that means different things to different people and make sustainability tangible. Their vision is to enable businesses and philanthropists to achieve real social impact whilst also being successful.

Prior to setting up the Sustainability Group Mike was Executive Director of Unicef UK, CEO of Action Contre Le Faim in Paris and Global Humanitarian Director at Save the Children.

Mike has a well-established track record in the commercial, humanitarian and development sectors, with 25 years’ experience working in aid and development as well as risk, crisis and disaster management in more than 60 countries.

Mike’s experience of crisis and emergency response is extensive and has included consultant deployments as Head of Operations for the UN WHO in Banda Aceh for the Tsunami response, Crisis Management Advisor for the Torino Winter Olympics, UK Government Department For International Development Operations advisor in numerous emergencies, including Iraq 2003 and the Pakistan earthquake in 2005, and as the Evacuation Team Leader for the inter-governmental civilian evacuations of Lebanon 2006, Guinea 2007 and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2007. Mike has also advised many large commercial organisations on how to operate effectively and ethically in fragile environments.

A former hostage, having been Kidnapped in Chechnya in 1996, Mike also occasionally works as a trauma councillor for other former hostages and their families.

In today’s episode we cover:

• What Sustainability means to Mike and what it should mean to business leaders
• How embracing Sustainability is not only the best way forward, but the only way forward
• How Sustainability is about more than just measurement…but about a culture which needs to be embraced and embodied at the very top of organisations
• How, when things change when, capital is contingent upon it and customers demand it - sustainability is currently that change and so the future may be brighter than we fear

Enjoy the show!

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Episode recorded December 11th, 2020