Gil Friend. CxO Coach. Sustainability OG.
Berkeley, California
Overview
I help purpose-driven executives and founders become more effective, impactful, successful, joyful, and chill in the face of the crazy—while building businesses that actually serve life. My clients include CxOs at global companies, serial tech entrepreneurs, and sustainability leaders navigating complex transitions—energy transition, climate risk, regenerative finance, agentic AI, global turbulence, and more. One client called our work "one of the best investments I've made, ever." A corporate strategy chief called the value we identified for his global company "massive." My executive coa
About
I help purpose-driven executives and founders become more effective, impactful, successful, joyful, and chill in the face of the crazy—while building businesses that actually serve life. My clients include CxOs at global companies, serial tech entrepreneurs, and sustainability leaders navigating complex transitions—energy transition, climate risk, regenerative finance, agentic AI, global turbulence, and more. One client called our work "one of the best investments I've made, ever." A corporate strategy chief called the value we identified for his global company "massive." My executive coaching isn't therapy and isn't consulting. It's a rigorous partnership—part strategy, part ontology, part accountability—for leaders ready to play a bigger game. I work with leaders who are done with incrementalism—who are committed to building something that truly matters and becoming who they need to be to make it happen. In my 50+ years in "sustainability," I've danced between worlds—between edge & center, philosophical & pragmatic, speculative & concrete, poetry & prose, words & numbers, emotion & analysis—guiding leaders of some of the world's best organizations on their sustainability journeys. That work earned me a place in the inaugural Sustainability Hall of Fame alongside Ray Anderson, Amory Lovins, and Karl-Henrik Robèrt, and recognition as "one of the 10 most influential sustainability voices in America." Think of me as an emissary from the future. At my best I'm a translator, carrying interpretations from one world into another, opening doors to understanding, windows to possibility...a bumblebee, carrying pollen from flower to flower, from stamen to pistil, providing a link in the fulfillment of a potential, providing a provocation in the opening of a mutation. At my very best, with my mentor Buckminster Fuller, I'm a trimtab—the tiny rudder that turns the big rudder that turns the great ship (where the forces of resistance against moving the rudder directly are too great). As I noted in 1991, "Nature's ecosystems have nearly 4 billion years of experience in the development of efficient, adaptive, resilient, and sustainable systems. Why should companies reinvent the wheel, when the R&D has already been done?" So if you're a purpose-driven leader ready for a thinking partner who won't let you off easy, let's talk. You can book a discovery call—no cost, no obligation, no net—at gil.coach. (Or ask my AI "clone" anything, 24/7, at delphi.ai/gfriend.)