Archives: Speakers

Guy Lawrence is responsible for running the UK Jagermeister business as CEO of MJUK Ltd, and is also their Regional Vice President of Latin America. He is an acting council member of the Portman Group, and The Spirits Council (WSTA. He is also Chairman of a super-premium Colombian rum brand called La Hechicera. Guy previously worked at Russian Standard Vodka as European Managing Director with responsibility for business leadership through the region including the UK, doubling the size of the business in the UK in 2 years. He has held a number of senior management roles within and outside the drinks industry, which has included working on 20+ M+A initiatives. This included 16 years with Bacardi in various UK and international sales and marketing positions, rising to the position of Global Brand Director.

BJ Cunningham is a serial Entrepreneur and ‘Brand Guru’. He famously created DEATH™ Cigarettes, where his Enlightened Tobacco Company PLC culminated after five years in a spectacular tax arbitrage scheme, threatening to overturn the tobacco industry and truly open up Europe for the consumer. His verve and irreverent reputation led him on to establish an Integrated Brand Marketing agency built upon his experience in business and brand building and the philosophy of ‘Corporate Religion’, an international business best seller that he co-authored.  Having sold the Agency is now a Visiting Professor at Brighton University, a member of the Super Brands Council and is a Board Level Brand Marketing Consultant to global brands including McDonalds, Microsoft and Turkish Glass producing giant Sisecam and he applies his left-field thinking with other companies such as Diageo, Bowers & Wilkins and The SignatureGlass Company of Pasabahce. Concurrently, he established and owns the luxury designer Women’s shoe brand Georgina Goodman, the bamboo cotton SocksoSimple brand and he travels internationally as a highly acclaimed key note speaker.

In the fall of 2017, Morten Lee Sørensen, a Danish digital nomad, decided to embark on a journey, a 100-day alcohol-free journey. A few years later that journey had evolved into the mindful drinking company ISH, based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Morten likes to challenge the norm and has done so continuously in his professional career that has evolved mostly around building multinational brands, before the path led him to building his own brand, ISH. Now exporting to over a 20 countries, ISH is on the mission to make mindful drinking easy – something Morten was missing as a mindful drinker.

Miriam has worked on the intersection between conservation and finance for the last 20+ years. With an MSc in Biology, she worked for almost ten years for WWF Netherlands. As a manager at WWF, she sometimes joked that biologists were becoming an endangered species, as she was hiring economists and political scientists. She strongly believes multidisciplinary teams are needed for the transition to a sustainable economy. She worked for IFC Africa in 2010-2013 on sustainable forestry and agriculture, based in Dakar. For WWF and IFC she traveled and worked in over 20 countries on 5 continents between 2000 and 2012. Upon return in the Netherlands, she took up her work in consultancy EcoValue again (founded in 2006). Miriam likes to work on a broad range of sustainability issues, shifting in perspective from big picture to details of sustainable investments, company CSR strategies, conservation programs or government procurement policies. Always back again to the big picture. Or in the words of astronauts: the Overview Effect.