52 Jean Oelwang interview Sapphire interview
‘Never J accept the
ean Oelwang is on the move: Washington, DC one day, New York City the next, London the day after, with more stops around the globe in months ahead. Her agenda is full – but that’s understandable, given her organization’s ambitious goal. “Our mission is to help scale business as a force for good,” she declares. “We are built on the fi rm belief that the world doesn’t need saving, it needs reinventing. And we need to think about how we do that through an entrepreneurial lens.” Applying business solutions to environmental and social problems is Oelwang’s specialty. As CEO of
As CEO of Virgin Group’s not-for-profi t arm, Jean Oelwang has made a specialty of applying commercial solutions to environmental and social issues – no matter how challenging that seems
unacceptable’ WORDS Michael Conner
Virgin Unite, the not-for-profi t arm of the Virgin Group, she directs a diverse portfolio of initiatives designed to demonstrate new “scalable” business models whose success may be critical to the health and future of the planet and its people.
New leadership models “Business as usual is not an option anymore,” she says. “We need to revolutionize the role that business plays in helping solve some of these issues, and we need to revolutionize the way that business, government and the not-for-profi t sector work together in those eff orts.” Often that starts within the Virgin Group, where
Oelwang and her colleagues collaborate with some 200 business units to drive social change in their core markets – working, for example, with Virgin Mobile on a program to help homeless teenagers in the US, or partnering with Virgin Holidays to open centres for entrepreneurship in the Caribbean that focus on sustainable tourism, starting this September. (The fi rst Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship opened in 2006 in Johannesburg, South Africa; another will soon launch in Zimbabwe.) But Oelwang and her colleagues have a much broader vision of what will be needed in the years ahead, a vision that extends well beyond Virgin. Leadership will be critical,
“We are built on the fi rm belief that the world doesn’t need saving, it needs reinventing. And we need to think about how we do that through an
entrepreneurial lens” JEAN OELWANG
CREATING CLIMATE WEALTH
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