Geoff McDonald

Geoff’s background in teaching, HR, marketing, communications, and sustainability is considerable. During his 25 years with Unilever (a global corporation with a turnover of £50 billion, 170,000 employees in 90 countries worldwide), his experience has taken him around the world, working across Africa, the Middle East, and Turkey, Australasia, and Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

His HR experience has spanned leadership and talent development, organization change, capability development with a particular reference to marketing, and business transformation with purpose at its core. Early in his career, he was responsible for graduate recruitment and development, talent, acquisitions, and development across Unilever’s emerging markets. Under his leadership, he developed Unilever’s global talent and leadership centre of expertise. More recently he devoted his time, energy, and effort to leading ground-breaking work where the HR function has played a central role in transforming Unilever’s business model with purpose at its core.

Geoff is devoting a significant amount of time to consulting for organizations, helping them define and embed Purpose as a driver of growth and profitability. He is a Strategic Advisor to RISE, the global corporate purpose advisory firm, in the area of Corporate Purpose and Organization Change.

His work today is truly global and he is a very much sought-after speaker, strategic advisor, and consultant. He inspires and provokes organizations around the world to put purpose and wellbeing at the centre of everything they do. Geoff's experience in Unilever, under the pupilage of Paul Polman, allows him to provide very practical insights and to speak on how to go about truly embedding PURPOSE and address the taboo associated with wellbeing (particularly mental health) within a large global multi-national organization. With this experience comes some real learning on what may or may not work. He recently had the opportunity to engage with Pope Francis on how we create a more sustainable and inclusive economy through his work with the Global Foundation.