Interview with Isabelle Grosmaitre, founder & CEO Goodness&co and Anna Convert, Impact Director Goodness&co
At Goodness&Co, you support leaders in transforming their business models for more sustainable future. What does bringing goodness into business means in concrete terms?
Goodness & Co was born from a conviction: that business can be one of the main drivers of progress in our society.
Goodness & Co is a positive transformation platform serving pioneering organisations. We work alongside committed leaders — those who are ready to truly reinvent their model and demonstrate their company’s contribution to society. This requires a genuine shift, a reinvention of practices that will not happen without courageous leadership.
Goodness in business means operationalising purpose: creating a model in which economic performance and positive impact are no longer opposed, but mutually reinforcing.
Isabelle, you have long championed positive transformation on a global scale. What have you learnt from your experiences, and how do they influence your approach to leadership and change at Goodness&Co today?
I have always wanted to contribute to a better world — those close to me would even say: to change the world. It is not a stance; it is a compass that has guided every one of my decisions.
Goodness&Co is a natural continuation of that journey — serving health, wellbeing and an economy that reconciles performance with purpose. We support pioneering organisations — L’Oréal, Adecco, KPMG, Roche, Microsoft and many others, representing €180 billion in turnover and a total of 1 million employees — that are deeply committed to becoming truly future-fit: ready not only to navigate the transformations ahead, but to drive them.
Business leaders have something extraordinary: the ability to change the lives of millions of people. They are levers of transformation at a scale that few actors can reach. That is why my approach to leadership is rooted in a deep conviction: putting people at the heart of the power of change. Not despite economic imperatives, but through them.
True leadership is leadership that unlocks people’s potential to transform the world.
Anna, your international career in major groups such as Adidas, L’Oréal and Mars has enabled you to bring together innovation, digital and sustainability. How do these experiences inform your role as Impact Director at Goodness&Co?
What those years in major multinationals taught me, above all, is one conviction: impact can only truly be built when it is designed at scale.
Working at L’Oréal or Mars means understanding from the inside the complexity of the challenges these organisations face — the constant tension between growth, innovation and responsibility, the sometimes conflicting expectations of stakeholders, and the need to reconcile immediate performance with a long-term vision. It is a complex and delicate dance, one that you can only really learn by practising it.
Today, this is precisely the experience I bring to the leaders I support at Goodness&Co. Weaving together positive impact, technology and leadership at scale — especially during periods of profound transformation — is a demanding exercise. But it is also where the real lever for change lies: convincing leading organisations that their power can become a force serving the common good.
I am proud to guide leaders towards these ambitious horizons — and to show them that large-scale impact is not a constraint, but a strategic opportunity.
You both advocate an approach to leadership based on awareness, cooperation and consistency between values and actions. How do you help leaders embody this purpose leadership on a daily basis?
When it comes to transformation, everything starts with leadership. The vision must be embodied every day in order for an entire business model to shift.
Within this dynamic, purpose plays a fundamental role: it is the compass that guides strategic decisions and stakeholder engagement. It does not remain engraved in the pages of an annual report — it guides, arbitrates and engages.
In concrete terms, we help leaders embody this purpose every day through four pillars:
- Value creation — reconciling economic performance with positive impact.
- Governance — dedicated programmes for Boards and Executive Committees to embed purpose at the highest level.
- Action coalitions — building alliances to accelerate transformation and amplify impact.
- Team empowerment — notably through our Empowerment Initiative AI tool, which helps mobilise and engage employees and stakeholders in the transformation.
A purpose that is not put into practice remains a promise. Our role is to bring it to life — at every level of the organisation.
As JFD members, what does our business and influence network represent for you in your thinking around innovation, impact and business transformation? What motivated you to join our network, and what would you like to contribute to it?
Joining JFD means joining a community that does what we deeply believe in: building bridges. Between innovation and people, between technology and meaning, and between organisations to amplify and accelerate the transformation the world needs.
In a world changing at exponential speed, the strength of a network like JFD lies precisely in its ability to bring together people driven by the same convictions: progress, impact, and the belief that women have a central role to play in shaping this future.
What motivated us was also consistency. At Goodness&Co, we support leaders who want to reconcile performance with the common good. JFD embodies that same level of ambition.
What we would like to bring to this network is our experience of large-scale change, our perspective on purpose leadership, and our practical tools for transforming organisations from within. But above all, we want to bring energy — the energy of women who are convinced that the best transformations are built together, through collective action.
We are proud and excited to be part of this journey.
Vanessa Masliah (L’Oréal Groupe), Béatrice Dautzenberg (L’Oréal Groupe), Philippe Aghion, Delphine Remy-Boutang (JFD), Isabelle Grosmaitre, Camélia Ntoutoume-Leclercq, Minister of Education in Gabon | ©JFD-François Tancré
You also integrate AI into your transformation support tools. How do you see the role of technology and AI in empowering leaders and their teams?
Technology and AI are first and foremost tools — powerful tools, capable of amplifying our impact through the strength of analysis and the speed of language models. But they do not replace vision: they serve it.
The deployment of responsible AI is at the heart of the agenda for the Boards and Executive Committees we support: how can I do my job better with AI, what impact will it have on the organisation, and how can we empower teams?
Let’s take a concrete example. One of our products, the Empowerment Initiative, supports leaders in empowering their teams and stakeholders. Integrating AI into this tool gives it a new dimension: the ability to guide leaders in real time, personalise change management support, and strengthen engagement at scale. The impact model itself does not change. What evolves is the how — and the speed at which it can be deployed.
The real question is not what can AI do? but what does AI enable us to preserve, unlock and amplify in service of value creation?
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Isabelle Grosmaitre, founder & CEO Goodness&co and JFD Member
Anna Convert, Impact Director at Goodness&co anf JFD Member
