Dr. Simon ZADEK
AccountAbility Chief Executive and Founder
Dr Simon Zadek, a British national, is Chief Executive of AccountAbility, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Government and Business of Harvard University’s Kennedy School, and an Honorary Professor at the University of South Africa’s Centre for Corporate Citizenship. He sits on the International Advisory Board of Instituto Ethos, the Advisory Board of Generation Investment Management, the Board of the Employers’ Forum on Disability and the Council of GAN-NET. In 2003 he was named one of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Global Leaders for Tomorrow’.
AccountAbility is a non-profit, membership organization established in 1995 to promote accountability innovations that advance responsible business practices and the broader accountability of civil society and public organizations.
Dr Zadek is one of the leading big-picture global thinkers on corporate social responsibility and accountability. His previous roles include Visiting Professor at the Copenhagen Business School, the Development Director of the New Economics Foundation, and founding Chair of the Ethical Trading Initiative. He has served on numerous Boards and Advisory Councils, including the State of the World’s Commission for Globalisation, the ILO’s World Commission on the Social Dimensions of Globalisation, the UN Commission for Social Development Expert Group on CSR, and the founding Steering Committee of the Global Reporting Initiative.
He sits or has sat on a number of boards including the Global Alliance for Workers and Communities, the World Bank’s, the Copenhagen Centre, the Nordic Partnership and the GRI. He has also advised and consulted with textiles and apparel, mining and energy, pharmaceuticals, and finance sector businesses and NGOs in Europe, the USA and Africa.
He has supported many business’ efforts around the world in driving accountability innovations into their strategies and practices. His work has increasingly focused on facilitating businesses and their stakeholders in developing mutual understanding and collaborative initiatives. His work in this regard has been both at company level, for example for Gap Inc in their work around labour standards, and GE in its development of its approach to human rights, through to his convening role of the MFA Forum, a large-scale collaboration involving leading textiles and apparel companies, civil society and labour organisations, international development agencies and financing institutions, and national governments and business associations.
He has authored, co-authored, and co-edited numerous publications, including more recently two Harvard Working Papers on the role of multi-stakeholder partnerships in development and governance, Governing Partnership Governance (2006) and The Logic of Collaborative Governance (2005). He has written extensively on the impact of corporate responsibility on the competitiveness of nations Responsible Competitiveness (2005). His PhD thesis was published as The Economics of Utopia (1994), and published an anthology of his writings Tomorrow’s History (2004). His book, The Civil Corporation: the New Economy of Corporate Citizenship (2001), has become a classic in the field, and has been recognised by the Academy of Management by being honoured as the Best Book Social Issues Award 2006.