Dr Gary Kendall has been working at the intersection of business strategy and systemic risk for well over a decade. He spent 8 years with Nedbank until early 2022, driving culture change and purpose fulfilment.  Prior to that, he was Deputy Director at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) in Cape Town for 3 years, helping business leaders in Southern Africa to understand the mounting system pressures that will reshape their operating context.

Gary previously served as Executive Director at SustainAbility, a hybrid think-tank and strategy consultancy based in London, where he advised numerous blue-chip organisations – including Ford, Shell, Nestlé, Novo Nordisk, Anglo American, A.P. Moller-Maersk and Sasol – on how to strengthen their business strategies with enhanced systems intelligence. His career in sustainable development began when he joined WWF International’s Climate & Energy team in 2006, which followed 9 years in the downstream oil industry with ExxonMobil, spanning diverse roles from technical services to sales, marketing and business development. Working across Europe, the US and Asia offered Gary first-hand insight to the strategic challenges faced by one of the economy’s most important yet problematic sectors.

Gary is the author of the WWF publication on electromobility “Plugged In: The End of the Oil Age”. He has a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Liverpool and has been a season ticket holder with Liverpool F.C. since 1991.