Geneva-based Gib is a visionary and inspiring thinker on the future role of business in society and mental health and resilience in the workplace.
Gib, who was born on the Isle of Bute in Scotland, has 25 years’ experience in the corporate world working at three of the world’s largest companies – BP, Mars and, most recently, Accenture.
While at Accenture, he set up the award-winning Accenture Development Partnerships, a corporate social enterprise that provided development sector organisations access to Accenture’s top people, knowledge and assets on a not-for-profit basis. This delivered quarter of a billion dollars’ of services across 80 countries in its first decade, winning awards for Accenture and making Gib one of the early pioneers of today’s global intrapreneurship movement.
But success came at a price: It ultimately cost him his job and his health as Gib found himself the unlikely resident of a psychiatric hospital in Glasgow following a burnout breakdown.
Turning this personal crisis into an opportunity, Gib wrote his first book, ‘The Intrapreneur: confessions of a corporate insurgent’, partly to help break taboos around mental health in the workplace, but also to inspire employees to drive social change as part of their day jobs.
With an insider’s view of the corporate engine, and an awareness of the impact that business can have on the individual, he is passionate about creating a more mindful, empowered and balanced approach to the world of work.
With this unique perspective on the relationship between business, society and the self, Gib looks at the current endemic of burnout in business and asks whether it is a failure of the individual to adapt, or a very natural response to a broken system? And how might we reimagine the role of business in society and co-create a new ‘4th sector’ that puts purpose on a par with profit.
Gib is in the process of creating Craigberoch, Scotland’s first business ‘decelerator’ on his native Island of Bute, which will use the power of art, music, nature and community to awaken a new generation of corporate changemakers.
The themes and topics Gib explores include:
- Re-inventing and democratising the global corporation
- Challenging the ‘mental health’ of the system
- Employee activism, intrapreneurship and millennial management
- The links between creativity, innovation and employee wellbeing
- Why accelerating change in business might start with slowing down
Gib has given talks for clients and events around the world, including TEDx, Geneva; The World Economic Forum, Davos; The Clinton Global Initiative, New York; Google Talks in Dublin; Intrapreneurship Conferences in Chicago and Barcelona; and business schools including London Business School, Harvard, Columbia, Wharton, Stanford INSEAD and Cranfield where he is a Visiting Fellow.
