Sustainable Brands Community

KoAnn is a seasoned business-to-business media executive who’s involvement with the intersection of environmental and human issues in business dates back to the mid-1980s when she launched international conferences on improving log utilization, reducing Waste Paper, and eliminating ozone-layer destroying chemicals (CFCs or chlorofluorocarbons). Throughout her career she has been engaged in testing…

KoAnn is a seasoned business-to-business media executive who’s involvement with the intersection of environmental and human issues in business dates back to the mid-1980s when she launched international conferences on improving log utilization, reducing Waste Paper, and eliminating ozone-layer destroying chemicals (CFCs or chlorofluorocarbons). Throughout her career she has been engaged in testing the connection between purpose driven leadership and competitive bottom line performance. As a result, her teams have consistently outperformed peers in both growth and profitability. Since 2003, she has devoted her full attention to the emerging field of social and environmental sustainability, launching Sustainable Life Media in 2004. She has helped various media entrepreneurs and NGO's including Sierra Club and Greenbiz.com establish their own paths to effectiveness and economic sustainability. In 2005, she produced the First International Conference on Cradle to Cradle Design in Practice with Bill McDonough, Michael Braungart, Peter Senge and others. In 2006, she launched what has now become http://www.sustainablebrands.com and in 2007, the widely respected Sustainable Brands Conference Sustainable Brands. Since then, Sustainable Brands has grown dramatically each year and has become the premier international community of sustainable business innovators.

Prior to founding Sustainable Life Media, KoAnn founded Organizations That Work a management consultancy focused on her passion for helping companies deliver breakthrough financial performance through purpose-driven leadership and improved organizational alignment and learning. Prior to that she served as Sr. Vice President of Miller/CMP Media, a multinational B2B media company, where she launched and built a $50million division focused on serving various emerging technology markets including the Computer Game Development market and others. While there, she launched several product brands, spearheaded a corporate rebranding initiative, and brought systems thinking and organizational learning principles to the executive level management team of the company.

KoAnn currently sits on the Advisory board at the Center for Sustainability at Pennsylvania State University and regularly speaks to corporate, academic and professional audiences about sustainability as the basis of a new renaissance of systems thinking and creativity driven by the need to shortstop impending human crisis, as well as the role brands must play and the steps they must take in order to survive and lead the way to a flourishing future. Through SLM and Sustainable Brands, she and her team hope to provide an open, creative space for many to benefit by exploring the opportunity to innovate for sustainability. KoAnn lives with her husband, Steve and their two sons, Josh and Jake on the San Francisco Peninsula.