Steering Group

The Steering Group of The Purposeful Company oversees the work of the organisation and is co-chaired by Clare Chapman and Will Hutton.

CLARE CHAPMAN | WILL HUTTON | ALEX EDMANS | TOM GOSLING | COLIN MAYER

Clare is Non-Executive Director and Remuneration Chair at the Weir Group and G4S in the UK, and at Heidrick and Struggles in the USA. In addition, Clare is the Chair of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas). Its purpose is to improve organisations and working life through the promotion and facilitation of strong industrial relations practices. Clare is also a Trustee of the Reconciliation Leaders Network supporting the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Prior to her Non-Executive career, Clare was the Group People Director at BT. She began her career with Quaker Oats and Pepsico in the UK, USA and Europe becoming the HR Vice President for PepsiCo’s soft drinks operations in mainland Europe. She was then appointed as the Group HR Director for Tesco and during her time there, the supermarket group grew to become the UK’s number one retailer in the UK. Between 2007 and 2011 Clare was the Director General of Workforce for the NHS and Social Care; this covered a workforce of over 2.2 million people and in this role Clare played a leading part in improvement. She was also one of the key architects of the NHS Constitution which captures the purpose, values and offer of the NHS to the public and staff that is now enshrined in law.

As one of the leading economics commentators in the country, Will is regularly called on to advise senior political and business figures and comment in the national and international media, recently reviewing pay equality for the BBC. He began his career in the City before moving to the BBC, becoming Economics Editor for Newsnight, then Economics Editor of the Guardian. He spent four years as Editor-in-Chief of The Observer and was Chief Executive of The Work Foundation from 2000 to 2008. He stepped down from the Principalship of Hertford College, Oxford after nine years in September 2020!

Will has chaired two government Commissions – one on Public Sector Pay for the Coalition government in 2011 and one on the Creative Industries for the Labour government in 2007. He has co-founded or chaired four think tanks (the Employment Policy Institute, the Work Foundation, the Big Innovation Centre and the Purposeful Company). His many best-selling books include ‘The State We’re In’ (1996), ‘Them and Us’ (2011), ‘How Good We Can Be’ (2015) and most recently with Andrew Adonis ‘Saving Britain’ (2018).

Alex has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, and given the TED talk ‘What to Trust in a Post-Truth World’ and the TEDx talk ‘The Social Responsibility of Business’ with a combined 2 million views. He is also Mercers School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, giving a four-year programme of public lectures, and serves on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee. Alex has a BA from Oxford and a PhD from MIT as a Fulbright Scholar, and was previously a tenured professor at Wharton and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.

Alex has published over 20 articles in the world’s most elite academic journals and is one of the most cited finance professors of his generation. He serves as Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, the leading academic finance journal in Europe.  At Wharton, Alex won 14 teaching awards in six years; at LBS, he won Best Teacher awards for the MBA and MFA programmes and the Excellence in Teaching award for best professor across all programmes. He has featured on Poets and Quants Best 40 Professors Under 40 and Thinkers50 Radar. His book, ‘Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit’, was named in the Financial Times Business Books of 2020 and he has recently become a co-author of the leading finance textbook ‘Principles of Corporate Finance’ (with Brealey, Myers, and Allen).

He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the European Corporate Governance Institute, a Professorial Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford and an Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is a member of the UK Government Natural Capital Committee, and the Board of Trustees of the Oxford Playhouse, and he was a member of the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal and the International Advisory Board of the Securities and Exchange Board of India. He was chairman of Oxera Ltd. between 1986 and 2010 and is a director of the energy modelling company, Aurora Energy Research Ltd.

Colin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours. He leads the British Academy enquiry into “the Future of the Corporation” and his most recent book Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good is published by Oxford University Press.

Tom has 20+ years of experience as a board adviser and is a leading independent authority on corporate governance and responsible business. Most recently he was a senior Partner at PwC where he established and led the firm’s executive pay practice, advising FTSE 100 and equivalent private and European companies on corporate governance and executive pay. Prior to joining PwC, Tom was a Research Fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University.

Tom engages extensively with regulators such as BEIS, the FRC and the FCA on remuneration, corporate governance and stewardship policy matters. He participated in a joint PwC and London Business School team commissioned by BEIS to fulfil the Government’s manifesto commitment to study the impact of share buybacks on executive pay and investment and represented London Business School on the FCA’s Purpose Working Group, contributing to the Discussion Paper on Transforming culture in financial services – driving purposeful cultures. Tom has given evidence to the BEIS Select Committee and the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards.