Tom Cummings
Entrepreneurial Founder. Executive Board Member. Adviser to leaders and teams in more than 30 countries over 30 years. Creative partner and thought leader for systemic visioning, enterprise performance and leadership renewal.
Tom brings a rich combination of experience, having consciously worked throughout his career from three perspectives: Entrepreneurial Founder of companies and inter-company alliances; Senior Executive in global companies; and an intellectual driver, adviser and board member in academe and charitable foundations. This experience gives him an unusual ‘pracademic’ perspective, and he is known for his ability to translate abstract ideas and concepts into useful plans and actions, bring new insights, sharp contrasts and fresh perspectives to his client engagements.
His mission is to lead transformation by transforming leaders. He does this by building incubators, labs, consortia and partnerships that foster a deeply shared commitment to working on behalf of the human family in ways that will improve the quality of life on Earth now and for future generations.
During his experience as a change agent working in senior executive roles in Unilever, ABN AMRO Bank, and Shell International, Tom applied his expertise as a planner and social systems thinker to design new forms of engagement team and organization learning. It was here that he learned that to influence change one needs to influence the context, relationships and inner landscape of leaders. For 25 years he has applied his craft to the cutting edge of mainstream business challenges facing hundreds of companies.
Overtime Tom felt compelled to expand his work beyond mainstream companies who are ready for change to collaborate with next-generation scale-ups and pace-setting companies. He began working with leading systems shifters including the Tallberg Foundation, Rocky Mountain Institute, Active Philanthropy and today is a founding designer of the CEO roundtable of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values and serves on the board of the B Corp movement in Europe.
As an entrepreneur, Tom has co-founded, financed and built companies and consortia, including North Atlantic Associates, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Technology Resources Group and many more.
As an academic, he has been an Executive Educator at the Universities of Cambridge, Pretoria, Insead, Dhaka, Strathmore, London, and The Netherlands Business University, Nyenrode.
As a Research Fellow and Academic at IMD and the University of London he has conducted research and case writing on Leading technological and social innovation through alliances and networks; and designing scenarios and strategies as an organization learning process. He has co-authored two books: ‘Leadership Landscapes’ and ‘Nine Visions of Capitalism’ and has published several cross-disciplinary articles and book chapters.
Tom is passionate about experimenting with new forms of insight generation, learning, and human engagement to foster and enable transformation that will lead to shared prosperity and sustainable business.
He is currently designing an emerging leaders’ program as a board member of the Tällberg Foundation in Sweden, centered on the question: «How On Earth Can We Live Together while fostering new thinking for a new reality?»