Mark thinks big and acts fast. He is a true change agent at the edge of business and society.
He brings a wealth of expertise and business experience from a career as a change agent and innovator.
Educated at Oxford University, Mark’s business career included a decade on the executive committee of a South African multinational with operations in 30+ countries including across Europe.
As the executive responsible for investor relations in two listed companies, he has worked extensively with investors worldwide.
He has served in numerous leadership roles in society including Founding Chair and CEO of the Globally Responsible Leadership Initiative – 100 global companies and business schools transforming leadership development at the world’s 20,000 business schools.
He has served advisory boards at The University of Pretoria, South Africa, The University of Cumbria, UK and The Business School of Lausanne, Switzerland.
His agriculture and land management experience includes seven years chairing a 35,000-hectare mixed farming, conservation and tourism enterprise in South Africa as well as co-owning a 700 hectare farm and conference centre where he applied regenerative farming to restore degraded land and improve economic performance. He has also served in the UK as a director of the Biodynamic Land Trust which owns and manages farms for ecological outcome. In a wider conservation context, he has chaired the largest local environmental NGO in Southern Africa which pioneered techniques of working with farmers to improve conservation and social impacts while simultaneously making them more economically productive.
Mark is also a brand and communications expert and served on the board of the 14,000-member International Association of Business Communicators, also chairing their world conference. In thought leadership, he is co-author of The Rise of the Meaningful Economy. Its ground-breaking insights explore how meaning has become a new currency changing our economic choices in terms of what we buy, where we work, how we invest and how we run our organisations.
PODCAST EPISODE #3
The episode in which Mark Drewell, co-founding collaborative CEO of New Foundation Farms, talks to Glen Burrows about why supermarkets are a thing of the past.
Starting with his involvement as a young manager in a steel company and the creation of the prototype of the peace committees which hailed the end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, Mark reflects on a career at the edge of business and society, how enterprise becomes institutionalised and why disruptive change always comes from the edge. His fundamental conclusion is that change is made by unreasonable people who have a vision of a better future and who get on with the work of making it happen.
Step away supermarkets: New Foundation Farms is coming.