Skip to main content
Change
Leadership
Sustainable Innovation

Leadership podcast: learning from experience

 David Williams
Published: January 5, 2024
Share this article:

An In Good Company podcast with David Williams, co-founder and CEO, Impact

The desire to make change happen

Could the 23-year-old you imagine leading an organisation for over 40 years? Taking a start up from kitchen table to a global organisation, whilst always keeping the same focus on liberating human potential.

Latest listen

That’s exactly what our guest (who is also our CEO!) has achieved. David Williams founded Impact in 1980 with nothing more than an idea and a passion for people development. In this podcast, he reflects on over 40 years' experience of bringing inspiration and change to the world’s leading organisations, argues the case that businesses hold the power to drive the change the world needs, and discusses the effectiveness of experiential learning.

Leading change for positive impact

"The elephant in the room that some people are recognising and other people are trying desperately to ignore is climate change. And Impact is in a great position to help our clients use the people they have in their organisation to decide upon the way they want to navigate the future.  For some organisations, that will mean recognising (through legislation or customer influence) that they need to make changes to their supply chain, to the products that they produce, or the way they produce those products. We can help with that.

We can help them by creating the right kind of dialogue and the right kind of innovations to enable that to happen. And it is my firm belief that whilst governments are very good at legislating what we can and can't do, and activists and not-for-profits are very good at protesting and pointing out where we are and where we need to be different, I have a firm belief that businesses are in the best place to make change happen. They have the financial wherewithal to make the future a better environment for them to operate in. They have the purpose and the desire to make change happen. And once they've made that decision, they will make change happen far more quickly than others in the field.

So if we're really determined to create a more regenerative future for ourselves, which I am, then I see businesses as being the best place to start and the best place to make that happen."

Listen to the podcast on Spotify

Watch our interview here:

Listen again

019: Making every voice heard with Kaja Podgórna-Strzelec, PwC Polska 

Coming up

021: Leading organisational change with Darren Evans, Calder Stewart

Follow Impact on Spotify and subscribe to our channel on YouTube

Find out more about how Impact are working with partners to have a positive impact