Barrett Brown
Core Competencies: Multi-stakeholder Engagement & Market Transformation; Leader Development; Corporate Social Responsibility; Strategic Alignment & Execution; Organizational Change & Learning; Executive Coaching.
For 20+ years Barrett has helped individuals and organizations to navigate complex change and unlock deep capacities. He is often asked to speak about leadership, and has presented worldwide to hundreds of CEOs and government officials. Barrett has been on the leadership team or advisory board of 16 companies, NGOs, and foundations, working in consumer goods, manufacturing, finance, energy, health care, media, and international development. He has lived in the USA, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Ecuador, worked in 21 countries, and traveled extensively.
Barrett has co-designed and co-led dozens of leader development programs for over 4000 executives from organizations such as Unilever, Nestlé, Mars, Bosch, Cargill, ADM, Dutch Government, City of New York, Banco Itaú, Natura, and Sara Lee. These range from master classes and innovation labs to corporate universities and multi-year executive education programs. His executive coaching is based on his award-winning research on the future of leadership and how to lead transformational change.
Barrett has also co-designed and co-led visioning, strategic alignment, culture development, and change processes for US and European companies and institutions. He specializes in complex change initiatives that involve multi-stakeholder alignment or corporate social responsibility. He co-led development and implementation of the learning strategy for a $250M program to transform the global supply chains of 12 agri- commodities. He also co-designed a $19M cocoa sector development program for 5 countries in West Africa and Asia. Recently, he co-led design of the Creating Shared Value (CSV) strategies for multiple divisions of a FMCG Fortune Global 100 company and a large-scale business-government alliance in the United Arab Emirates.
In the international arena, Barrett is on the selection committee of the Katerva Awards, considered the Nobel Prize for sustainability. He holds consultancy status to the United Nations via Kosmos Journal, and has delivered leadership briefings at UNDP headquarters, the US Department of State, and the Inter-American Development Bank. He has presented at multiple UN World Summits on Sustainable Development and at international conferences including the Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit, the European Forum of the Society for Organizational Learning (keynoting with Peter Senge) and Bioneers.
Barrett’s articles on leadership and sustainability are used in executive education programs and universities worldwide as well as in the United Nations system. His recent whitepaper on The Future of Leadership for Conscious Capitalism was called “immensely important” by John MacKey, Co-CEO of Whole Foods. In collaboration with Unilever and IMD business school, he co-produced an award-winning series of business case studies on market transformation. Barrett presents in both English and Portuguese, has mid-level fluency in Spanish, and his writings have been translated into Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Farsi. He also led translation of the acclaimed book Conscious Business into English from its original Spanish. Barrett holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Human and Organizational Systems from Fielding Graduate University, and a B.A. in English Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He lives in the San Francisco area with his wife and young daughter, and can be reached at barrettbrown@metaintegral.com.
