Find the light
I’m a co-founder and partner at ENSO, where we help companies create positive futures — aligning business success with enduring value and impact.
Longer story
I grew up in a small village in England — one shop, a three digit phone number, four TV channels. Most days were spent exploring fields, rivers and woods by bike with my brother. That early sense of exploration, curiosity, movement, has never left me.
My father ran a small business, and I absorbed the idea that business could be a creative force: a way to make things, solve problems, shape the world. I studied economics, law, corporate finance, and joined a Boston-based strategy consultancy, helping companies start and scale new ventures. The exploration continued — this time across countries, companies and emerging technologies — living and working in Boston, London, Tokyo, and eventually Los Angeles.
In LA I found a default orientation towards possibility. It’s where I found the world of social innovation: work focused not just on growth, but on solving problems that matter. I joined GOOD Magazine at a moment when purpose-driven business was still peripheral. When large companies began asking us how to ‘do well and do good’, I co-founded a spin-off agency, GOOD/Corps in 2009. Our work included the Pepsi Refresh Project, which became a Harvard Business School case study, and new initiatives for Starbucks, Google and the Gates Foundation.
When it became clear that an agency and a media company couldn’t easily co-exist, Kirk Souder and I founded ENSO in 2012. Google became our first client and a deeply supportive partner; over the next decade we worked with nearly every part of the company. That work opened the door to more ambitious, mission-oriented partners seeking to align growth with meaning and strategy with story.
Across ENSO’s work, a few themes have become central to me. The most persistent is optimism — not as naive positivity, but as a practical precondition to progress. Another is the power of shared missions: how organizations move forward not through individual heroics, but through collective narratives that people can belong to, and be part of. And underlying both is a belief that belonging within companies, communities and countries — and with nature — is one of the most under-leveraged solutions to our current challenges.
Photography is part of this practice. It’s how I slow down enough to notice what’s working: finding ‘the light’ of resilience, quiet possibility and everyday awe. Writing and design are extensions of that attention—ways of shaping stories and systems that make better futures feel plausible and actionable.
I’ve come to believe that ‘the words we speak are the house we live in’ (Hafiz), and I see my role as helping leaders choose words, stories and strategies to make room for optimism-fueled progress.
Outside of ENSO, I write for Fast Company, I’m a Gates Foundation Goalkeeper, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a board member of Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.
I live in LA, with the wonderful @kerrykb.