Rebel of the Month — April 2015 — Steve Jennings

As many of you know, my “night-job” is Corporate Rebels United, a movement to unite Corporate Rebels worldwide to ensure that true change happens virally from deep within the fabric of our organisations.

Every month we celebrate a Corporate Rebel who went the extra-mile: in helping our movement, in completing a hack, in pulling together a value practice, or doing something really awesome in the organisation they work for. “Rebel of the Month” is recognition for a Corporate Rebel exposing the sort of behaviours we would like to encourage in our movement.

Our “Rebel of the Month” for April 2015 is Steve Jennings from Malmö, Sweden.

I got in contact with Steve in July 2012 when Tom La Forge, Global Director, Human & Cultural Insights at The Coca-Cola Company — and like myself member of Jerry Michalski’s REXpedition — suggested me to get in contact with Steve. Since then we had regular Skype-calls to chat about our rebellious ambitions, our doubts, our difficult moments, and when needed energising each other to keep fighting for the good cause.

Steve is high-energy. He walks and talks fast. He acts fast. He dares to be great and take on big bets. He is for good and for better.

Most people associate Steve with business and social entrepreneurship, but in reality he’s probably more of an artist and adventurer, who most of the time just happens to be creating art and adventuring in a business context.

Steve’s background is varied and original. On the surface it may appear as if he’s had 9 different careers. The one constant in everything that he does is that it’s an extension of who he really is deep down inside. For Steve, it’s never been about a job or a career, it’s more about a calling.

Steve grew up in Hull in the north east of England in the 1960’s and 70’s. His journey has taken him from studying to be an engineer, to realizing his boyhood dream of becoming a professional road racing cyclist, to working as an investment broker with Lloyds — TSB, to founding Maxim one of Europe’s leading sports nutrition companies, to helping found the Canadian open-source non profit organization Bicycles for Humanity, to becoming one of the founding members of PepsiCo’s global good-for-you nutrition innovation team, to founding the youth empowerment initiative zyOzy Foundation, to developing GoodCred a complimentary currency platform, to co founding Better Ventures a company focused on bringing crowdsourcing innovation, marketing participation and intelligence commercialization to companies and brands with a global footprint.

Steve is very excited about ethical use of personal data and wonders whether we we can democratize data by igniting a crowd powered global movement with the aim of building a collaborative social fabric-enabling layer across diverse cultures and markets. Here is his talk of last November at Oredev Con 2014.

There is also a great recent write-up about Steve here:

Steve is the entrepreneur in residence at Lund Universities Open Innovation Center, where he’s focused on developing new models aimed at bringing about the radical change in attitudes that are needed during times of unprecedented social, economic, environmental, demographic, and political uncertainty. In addition to this role he also mentors students enrolled on the Masters of Entrepreneurship program at Lund University.

Steve’s personal mantra is; build paths for others to follow, share what you’ve learned and think like a pioneer.

“I create moments that give me a lot of freedom; physically, emotionally and creatively. The only way for me to remain relevant is to consistently help other people and companies to create value. For this to happen, I need to be out and about in the world, travelling, meeting and talking with a wide range of different and highly diverse people. It is a way of thinking, and a way of being as a person.” — Steve Jennings 2015.

When he is not travelling, you can find Steve in his home in Malmö in the south of Sweden, or online at the following destinations.

• Twitter: @stevejennings1
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sjennings1
• Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/rifraf/presentations

May 2, 2015 by petervan