Change Makers: Leadership, Good Business, Ideas and Innovation

Alison Goldsworthy is CEO of The Depolarization Project . A former Deputy Chair of the UK Liberal Democrats, she previously led the team that built the fastest growing campaigning NGO in the UK. Ali is Vice Chair of the grant-giving Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust , and sits on the board of global media outlet Open Democracy . Born and brought up in Wales, in 2017 she was a Sloan Fellow at Stanford's...

Tamara Lohan is an entrepreneur and technology strategist who co-founded the boutique hotel travel specialists Mr & Mrs Smith with her husband James. As CTO, Tamara was responsible for evolving the company's digital infrastructure. She became CEO of the company in 2020. Today, Mr and Mrs Smith operates from offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, Singapore and Ibiza and has more than 1.5 mil...

Anna Brailsford is the CEO of Code First: Girls, a social enterprise that looks to increase the amount of women in tech, by training women in IT skills and helping companies to develop more inclusive recruitment policies. Anna is also a Board Member for the Institute of Coding. Before joining CF:G Anna was the CEO and co-founder of Founders Factory incubated EdTech startup Frisbee. Prior to that,...

Professor Muhammad Yunus established the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983, fuelled by the belief that credit is a fundamental human right. His objective was to help poor people escape from poverty by providing loans on terms suitable to them and by teaching them a few sound financial principles so they could help themselves. From Professor Yunus’ personal loan of small amounts of money to destit...

Nigel was appointed Group Chief Executive in 2012 having joined as Group Chief Financial Officer in 2009. He is leading the 50/50 by 20/20 gender diversity initiative. Nigel was awarded City AM’s “Business Personality of the Year” in 2014. Nigel also won the ‘Most Admired Leader’ award at Britain's Most Admired Companies Awards 2017, for Management Today. In 2019 Nigel won ‘Change Maker of the Yea...

Sharmadean Reid is the Founder and CEO of Beautystack. Her mission is to use technology to economically empower women in the beauty and wellness industries, globally. A former fashion stylist and brand consultant who started WAH as a hip hop magazine for girls in 2006 while still at university, she then founded WAH Nails as a side project in 2009. WAH completely changed the beauty landscape with i...

This week, Michael is joined by music maestro turned tech titan Jeremy Silver, CEO of Digital Catapult. He has used his remarkable creativity to boost the UK’s digital sector, helping the UK's best tech entrepreneurs transform some of their brightest ideas into reality. He started his career in the 1990s, working with Genesis, Meatloaf and Brian Eno as a music executive, before turning his attenti...

Canadian-British, London-based Edeline Lee graduated from Central Saint Martins and launched her eponymous label in 2014. In between her degrees, she apprenticed in the studios of Alexander McQueen in London and John Galliano in Paris. She is known for her immersive and performative shows at London Fashion Week. Edeline has received strong support from the women of the art world, who naturally gra...

Founding editor of Country & Town House, Lucy Cleland has been in the glossy magazine business for around 20 years, and divides her time between the glamour of Acton and the mud and wellies of the New Forest with her husband and two children. She founded Country & Town House with her husband back in 2007, a year before the huge financial crash – originally launched as Country House, before...

Charmian believes in the power of business as a force for good and has first-hand experience in what it is like to be an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur and a systempreneur. Charmian is the Co-Founder and Chair of B Lab UK, where she supports the growth of B Corps across the UK (and beyond) and is Co-Chair of B Lab’s Global Climate Taskforce where she is a member of the UNFCCC’s Marrakesh Partnershi...

Holly Tucker MBE is a British entrepreneur, philanthropist, and UK Ambassador for Creative Small Businesses. She is founder and chief inspiration of the online marketplace, notonthehighstreet.com and founder of Holly & Co, a small business advice and inspiration platform. notonthehighstreet.com has grown to become an award-winning online marketplace, providing a retail platform for 5,000 curat...

General Petraeus served over 37 years in the U.S. military, culminating his career with six consecutive commands, five of which were in combat. Following retirement from the military and after Senate confirmation by a vote of 94-0, he served as Director of the CIA. Today, he is a Partner with the global investment firm KKR and Chairman of the KKR Global Institute, which he established in May 2013....

Sir Max Hastings is an author, journalist and broadcaster whose work has appeared in every British national newspaper.  He now reviews regularly for the Sunday Times. He has published 27 books and three collections of writing about the British countryside and field sports. He spent most of his early years as a foreign correspondent for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard, reporting eleven confl...

Whitney Bromberg Hawkings is the founder of the online luxury florist FLOWERBX. Her career began aged 23 as assistant to Tom Ford during his time as creative director of Gucci. After he left to establish his eponymous label in 2005, Whitney joined him and worked her way up to become Ford's senior vice-president of communications. After realising that flowers were the one product she couldn't buy i...

As founding director of Foundervine, Izzy provides founders with access to training, mentoring and funding opportunities. Since 2018, 2,000 young people have been skilled by Foundervine programmes, $230,000+ raised with 62% female participation. She is an experienced public speaker and has helped people grow at global brands such as Just Eat, Facebook, PwC, Google, AirBnB and more. Izzy is a Non-E...

Nana Badu is founder of Badu Sports & Badu Community, providing top quality PE specialists, who mentor and develop the children and young people we work with, while simultaneously extending their learning on matters both within and beyond the classroom walls. At Badu Community he and his team support the transition young people go through during critical stages of their lives, starting from pr...

Gavin is CEO of Here East – the 1.2 million sq ft technology and Innovation campus on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London, and one of the fastest growing business clusters in the UK. Recently, Gavin has been at the forefront of developing the concept of creating London’s first digital games and esports cluster. Prior, Gavin served as an engineering officer in the UK Royal Air Force for over...

This week, multi-talented entrepreneur, Poppy Jamie, the founder of wellness start-up Happy Not Perfect and co-founder of fashion accessories brand Pop & Suki joins Michael on Change Makers. The influencer and former TV presenter discusses mental health and how to help us feel happier, less anxious and more positive. Poppy shares her story of why she launched her app back in 2018 after experie...

This week, professional footballer Mathieu Flamini speaks to Michael about his career and co-founding GF Biochemicals, a fast-growing producer of levulinic acid. From growing up on the beaches of Marseille to a football career at the highest level, in this episode, Mathieu demonstrates he is an athlete with a difference who has a huge amount of drive and ambition to put people's health and our pla...

Born in Asia, raised in Africa and educated in Europe and the US, James Chen is a venture philanthropist with a global outlook. The importance of giving back was instilled in him by his father, Robert Yet-Sen Chen, whose lifetime of philanthropic work led to the creation of The Chen Yet-Sen Family Foundation, which focuses on improving early childhood literacy. As chairman of the Foundation, James...

IMAGINE Co-Founder and CEO, Valerie helps leaders use their power for good. With deep expertise in transformation, she helps global corporations become purpose-led and future-fit, and convenes cross-sector coalitions to accelerate tipping points for humanity’s Global Goals. Valerie is an Associate Fellow of the University of Oxford Saïd Business School where she directs executive education program...

Maurice Ostro, OBE, is a serial entrepreneur, philanthropist and chair of the Business Action Council. He has fused the two major strands of his career to create eg (Entrepreneurial Giving), a movement to help entrepreneurs to be more successful and encourage them to embed purpose within their businesses. On the one hand, Ostro is a successful entrepreneur. His business ventures have ranged from f...

Anne Sebba is a biographer, lecturer, journalist and former Reuters foreign correspondent. She has written 10 critically-acclaimed books of non-fiction, mostly about iconic women who enjoyed using power and influence in different ways such as Enid Bagnold, Mother Teresa, Laura Ashley and Jennie Churchill, as well as her 2016 book Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the...

Justin Webb is a journalist and anchor for the Radio 4 Today programme. He joined the BBC as a graduate trainee in 1984 working in Northern Ireland for BBC Radio Ulster based in Belfast, before joining Today as a reporter. He later worked as a foreign affairs correspondent based in London, followed by stints presenting BBC Breakfast news and the Six O'Clock News, and three years working as the BBC...

Baroness Ruby McGregor-Smith CBE was appointed President of the British Chambers of Commerce in March 2020. She was the CEO of Mitie Group PLC from 2007 to 2016, the first Asian female chief executive of a FTSE 250 company. During the decade she spent at Mitie, the firm increased its turnover by £1.5bn, which passed the £2bn mark for the first time in 2012. She was nominated as a Conservative life...