Simon is co-lead of Oliver Wyman’s climate and sustainability platform and chief strategy officer of Lippincott, the firm’s brand and innovation specialists. Simon established Lippincott’s business in Europe and the Middle East and led its growth over fifteen years.
With over thirty years of consulting experience, Simon has helped clients to develop and communicate their sustainability strategies and propositions. His work links business purpose, brand, innovation, and proposition design with deep insight into how people engage with climate change and sustainability – as consumers, colleagues, and citizens.
Simon first got involved in sustainability in the early 2000s, when he created a report described as the world’s first major study of brand value and climate change for the Carbon Trust. In the absence of proven customer behavior change, Brand value at risk from climate change focused on potential tipping points. “The sad truth is that there has been so little behavior change that if we did the same project today the report would not be very different,” Simon says.
There is no neutral position to take on climate change: any company not acting on climate change is actively contributing to the problem.
Many companies do want to prioritize sustainability, Simon notes, but they may be unclear on how to do so effectively and commercially. His role is to help them.
Simon has worked both with commercial clients such as IKEA, Nokia, and HSBC, and non-commercial clients such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the Potential Energy Coalition, The Climate Group, and HRH The Prince of Wales. He supported the creation of the We Mean Business coalition and more recently the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s Vision 2050 program.
I’m passionate about helping any client realize its ambition and potential in sustainability. That can mean working in often high-carbon sectors like oil and gas, or low-carbon sectors that can enable the transition elsewhere, like finance, telecoms, or media. In either case it’s about driving the transition at scale, not celebrating small islands of cleanness.