‘Corporate purpose? It went too far’, says man behind Britain’s Davos
John O’Brien founded Anthropy – an annual gathering of corporate and political luminaries dubbed ‘Britain’s Davos’ – to help the UK ‘build back better’ from the pandemic. On the eve of its third instalment in the Eden Project’s greenery, Ali Lyon asks the ex-army captain, “Has it failed?”
It is October 2022, and a group of Britain’s leading corporate and political minds have decided to decamp from the attention-span-sapping capital and make their way west to the Cornish town of St Austell.
With much of the world still reeling from the after-effects of the coronavirus pandemic, Cornwall’s inbound guests were an incongruous group, spanning pugnacious captains of industry, white-trainer-clad media execs, and caffeine infused party politicians.
The destination for the group, whose number included Cobra founder Baron Bilimoria, Iceland Foods’ Richard Walker, ex-editorial director of the BBC Kamal Ahmed and then-Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, was ‘Anthropy’, a new corporate summit being held in the biomes of the Eden Project.
And their mission was simple: help the UK ‘build back better’ from the epoch-shattering pandemic that had defined the previous two years.
In hindsight, even the most charitable of observers would struggle to say the attendees succeeded. Since Anthropy’s inaugural gathering we’ve seen the outbreak of two separate hot wars, double-digit inflation, and next to no economic growth.
But this week, over 2,000 high-flying execs will return to the south coast for the gathering’s third instalment. And while they may not have single-handedly delivered Britain an improved post-COVID settlement, the event itself has gone from strength to strength.
Every year since 2022, an ever-larger number of delegates have reconvened in Anthropy’s idyllic, biophillic setting. They have covered subjects as highfalutin as ‘Exploring Human-Centred Leadership’, ‘Building equity in Society: Positive Pathways’ or the regular ‘State of our Nation’ panel. The summit-cum-festival has even come to be branded the UK’s answer to Davos.
Anthropy in a changed world
This year, guests will be treated to talks and panels across 18 stages from the likes of Baronness Lane Fox, Rupert Soames, and London Stock Exchange chief Dame Julia Hoggett. All with the aim, founder John O’Brien tells City AM, of encouraging leaders from different sectors and professions, “to have conversations they don’t normally have”.
But with Trump’s intoxicating brand of populism ascendant in the White House, and the ‘international rules-based order’ hanging by a thread, the mood among its largely progressive, ‘small L-liberal’ crowd is likely to be markedly more sober than its idealistic 2022 origins.
“We grew out of the COVID pandemic,” says O’Brien, who as well as his storied career in the army was also an executive at the advertising holding company Omnicom. “But when you think back to [that time],” he adds, “you could almost look back there and think it was easier then than it is now in terms of the uncertainty around tariffs, trade wars et cetera.”
It’s a change that is reflected in the agenda. Where economic sessions once covered fanciful themes like ‘Selling Degrowth’, they are now on coarser, more calcified topics like ‘How industrial strategies can help London’s economy’, and whether gentle density can fix the UK’s housing crisis.
The politically-oriented subject matter has metamorphosed, too. This year, O’Brien and his guest speakers will ask how we fix a fractured Britain after the 2024 riots. A stark contrast from previous gatherings, which looked at how ‘climate politics obstructed climate action’ and then hosted a sustainable fashion show at which models held aloft signs saying ‘smash the silo’ and ‘green is the new black’.
Purpose-less event
But nowhere is the passage of the last two years – a period which saw an end to over a decade of cheap money and an even longer peace dividend – more evident than in the discussions on corporate affairs.
Anthropy was the product of an age when the ‘purpose‘ and ‘stakeholder capitalism‘ movements were at their zenith. When the prevailing wisdom dictated that – unless a company burnished its environmental and social credentials in every advertising campaign or annual report – it would lose custom from consumers and cash from investors.
In the early gatherings, visitors could hardly move for events discussing how businesses could take advantage of this new corporate order. And in 2023, even Severn Trent Water – a company that little more than a year on would find itself fined £2m by the Environment Agency for ‘reckless’ pollution – sponsored a panel titled, ‘The sceptical Business leader’s guide to getting nature positive’.
But delegates at this year’s gathering would be hard pressed to root out even one session informing them how to embrace ‘purpose’, which have given way to talks like the more hard-headed – and fully-booked – talk on the influence of non-executives.
And that shift comes despite the fact that O’Brien is, himself, one of the doyennes of purposeful business. He has written no fewer than three books on the merits and nature of purpose, one of which was number three at WH Smith, and a Forbes top 15 leaders read.
But is its absence from proceedings at Anthropy a tacit acknowledgement from O’Brien that the movement was a fad?
“If you’re looking at a business that has an understanding… of the wider impact it has on society… that should just be good business in every definition,” he says. “But labels like CSR, purpose have now got in the way of that.”
O’Brien has little truck with firms that sought to shoehorn purpose into individual products in search of quick buck. He sympathises with star stockpicker Terry Smith, who let off an excoriating attack on Unilever when it declared the raison d’etre of Helmann’s mayonnaise to be ‘fighting food waste’. Smith famously said that Unilever – then run by Alan Jope – had “lost the plot”. O’Brien prefers to brand it “nonsense”.
But Anthropy’s host is adamant that even if the purpose is less prominent in brands’ adverts, or at this year’s Anthropy, firms should still have a reason to exist beyond their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
“The vast majority of people leading serious, significant businesses know that if they’re going to create good, serious shareholder value, they’ve got to be alert to the wider way in which their business operates – that’s all this is about,” he says.
‘Purpose’ was also conspicuous by its absence at this year’s instalment of Davos, which Anthropy has started to be compared. The annual c-suite pilgrimage to the Swiss Alpine town took place just days after Trump’s inauguration. And his promise to ‘drill baby drill’, and go after firms’ proactive diversity policies in the courts set the tenor for much of the 2025 gathering.
As an event with a reputation as an elitist talking shop, it divides opinion. But O’Brien, who was encouraged to establish Anthropy by World Economic Forum boss Klaus Schwabb, believes the comparisons between his event and Davos are mostly helpful.
“I think there’s some negativity around being described as a Davos,” he says. “It doesn’t suit everybody, and it can be seen as elitist… but for many others it conjures up a certain idea of what the event is.”
But Swiss homage to capitalism isn’t the only gathering to which Anthropy has been compared. An equal number – O’Brien says – have called it a “Glastonbury for good”, while others have said it is redolent of “a national TED talk”.
And what Anthropy lacks in the private jets of Davos or the Class A drugs of Glastonbury, it makes up for in the remarkably cult following it has accrued in just a few years.
For many flocking down to Cornwall this week, this will be their third gathering. And just as Taylor Swift-loving Glastonbury goers might refer to themselves as ‘Swifties’, some die hard fans have even taken to adding ‘Anthropist’ to their Linkedin job title; though O’Brien concedes there “are not quite as many Anthropists as there are Swifties”.
And who can blame them? Three days listening to talks from the likes of Sir Trevor Phillips and Angela Rippon surrounded by the sun-draped flora of the Eden Project is an alluring sell. Whether or not they can single-handedly help the UK build back better from COVID, or solve some of Britain’s most intractable issues while they’re there, is another question entirely.