Hedstrom Associates

Gilbert (Gib) Hedstrom is President of Hedstrom Associates, a consulting and advisory firm providing assistance at the intersection of governance, strategy, and the environment. He has over 25 years of experience advising CEOs and board members about how to handle difficult environmental and business challenges, and has reported directly to boards of directors of Fortune 500 companies on over 50 occasions. Mr. Hedstrom provides consulting services to companies that want to be profitable, to be admired for their societal contributions, and to thrive as successful enterprises. His clients have included Alcoa, AlliedSignal, Ashland, Baxter, BP, Conoco, Cytec, Dell, HP, Kodak, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, PEMEX, Raytheon, SC Johnson, Shell and United Technologies, among many others. Example assignments include:

• Directing The Conference Board's Environment, Health, Safety and Sustainability Council, a member-only group of corporate officers responsible for environment and sustainability from ~65 major companies (e.g., 3M, Alcoa, Boeing, Cargill, Caterpillar, Chevron, Colgate-Palmolive, Deere, Duke Energy, DuPont, ExxonMobil, GE, Johnson & Johnson; IBM, Lockheed Martin, Merck, Pfizer, Wal-Mart, and Xerox).
• Working with Shell from 1996 to 2001 to develop a robust Sustainable Development (SD) program. The work involved executive workshops, developing key performance indicators, building a SD management system, and making the business case for sustainability.
• Assisting the management team of a major petrochemical company in launching a new (billion dollar) "sustainable" business. This work included fully integrating sustainability market drivers into the business strategy, external benchmarking, a sustainability footprint analysis of the business, and several leadership team sustainability strategy workshops.
• Leading comprehensive environmental governance reviews for the CEO of a major steel company and the Board of Directors of a Fortune 200 petrochemical company.
• Providing independent counsel on environmental issues and opportunities to the boards (or board committees) of over a dozen major companies.
• Helping over 25 companies with sustainability reporting since the late 1980s. He reviewed many of the first third-party certifications of external environmental reports and was a founding member of the Global Reporting Initiative. He partners with NGOs including Ceres, Environmental Defense Fund, The Conservation Fund, World Resources Institute.

Mr. Hedstrom has authored several books and written dozens of articles related to environment, governance, strategy, and sustainability. He is frequently called upon to speak on business risks and opportunities created by environmental and social trends.

Prior to launching Hedstrom Associates, Mr. Hedstrom spent 20 years at Arthur D. Little (ADL) leading the firm's EHS auditing, strategy, and governance work; managing activities throughout Europe and Asia; and leading the firm's worldwide sustainability team. For several years, he carried out those responsibilities from Brussels. He was elected a Vice President in 1989. Prior to joining ADL, he spent four years at GE in finance.

Mr. Hedstrom has dual master's degrees from the University of Michigan (MBA Corporate Strategy; MS Natural Resource Management) and a BA Economics and Geology) from Hamilton College. He has serves on the board of Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, University of Michigan.