PEOPLE

Peter Willis

Peter is Director of Cambrige Programme for Sustainability Leadership’s South African office. He is responsible for the Southern African Senior Executives Seminar of The Prince of Wales’s Business & the Environment Programme. He is also involved in designing sustainability learning programmes for multinational corporations in and outside Africa. Previously Peter was Executive Director of The Natural Step in South Africa, an international NGO consulting to businesses and local authorities around sustainability strategy. Peter has degrees from Oxford and London Universities and has lived in South Africa since 1993.

Dr Gary Kendall

Gary is the Deputy Director of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership in South Africa. He has worked with CPSL since January 2011, having previously led SustainAbility’s think tank function. He regularly contributes articles – in particular relating to energy security and climate change – and speaks at international conferences and through the media. Gary has advised several leading companies on how to approach and tackle sustainability challenges, including Coca-Cola, Ford, Nestlé, Novo Nordisk, Rio Tinto, A.P. Møller-Maersk and Shell. Previously, Gary spent two years working in WWF’s Global Climate & Energy program, where his main interests were the causes of – and solutions to – the series of environmental perils associated with society’s addiction to hydrocarbon fuels. This followed nine years in the oil industry with Mobil (and later ExxonMobil), spanning diverse roles from Research and Product Development to Sales, Marketing, and Business Development. Working across Europe, the US and Asia offered Gary first-hand insight to the strategic and day-to-day sustainability challenges posed by one of the world’s most problematic sectors.
Gary is the author of the WWF publication “Plugged In: The End of the Oil Age”.

Magda de Kok

Magda is Senior Project Manager of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership’s Southern African office. She joined CPSL in May 2002 as Seminar Coordinator of the Prince of Wales’ Business & the Environment Programme. In this capacity she coordinates seminars for senior executives in sustainability. Previously she worked at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business for 5 years. There she ran a research programme in entrepreneurship and was instrumental in sourcing the funding and setting up of the UCT Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Magda holds degrees in anthropology and languages from Rand Afrikaans University (now Johannesburg University) and the University of South Africa.

Elspeth Donovan

Elspeth joined CPSL as Development Director in the Southern African office on 1 November 2008. From 2003-2006 she was the director of the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School MBA. She was instrumental in the introduction of the Modular MBA programme and introduced ‘The Role of Business in Society’ as an integrating course on the MBA with a strong emphasis on sustainable business practice being the underpinning philosophy of the programme. From 2006 she was an independent executive education consultant. At UCT she co-taught an MBA elective called ‘Social Entrepreneurship’, which exposes the students to hands on experience of working with enterprises creating social and financial value. She regularly supervises MBA theses in the broad area of Social Enterprise. She designed and directed various leadership programmes for companies through the UCT Graduate School of Business, including the Executive Leadership Programme (an open programme), senior leadership programmes for Anglo Platinum and a Women in Leadership programme for Johnson & Johnson (Europe, Middle East & Africa). Elspeth also led the design of the entire curriculum for TSIBA Education, an innovative Cape Town business school for students from impoverished backgrounds and is Chair of the Board of Christel House South Africa, a privately run school for children from impoverished backgrounds. Elspeth has a BSc and an MBA from University of Cape Town.

Dirk Visser

Dirk is a Programme Manager at the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership’s South African office. His responsibilities include the South African Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change and designing and delivering tailored corporate programmes on risk, innovation and investment. He also serves as faculty for the Cambridge Sustainability Practitioners Programme. At recent conferences he has presented on ‘Sustainable Infrastructure Investment’, ‘Open Innovation’ and ‘Business and the Common Good’.

Dirk is a co-founder and chairman director of Brightest Young Minds, a leading youth driven social entrepreneurship initiative, and co-founder of the Open Innovation Studio in Cape Town. He is currently busy with a Masters degree in Futures Studies at the University of Stellenbosch Business School.