Marianne Berendse
‘Real change hurts.
If it doesn’t hurt,
it’s just rearranging.’
Marianne Berendse is an expert in change management. In order to move organizations to an actual change of culture (or culture of change), she confronts them with views, concepts and ideas from unconventional domains. To this end she has access to the most influential professional networks at home and abroad.
As a design thinker and visualizer, she emphasises and demonstrates the crucial importance of imagination and creativity in change processes and depicts complicated issues in concise and meaningful images.
Marianne joins us from Rotterdam in The Netherlands.
Corporate experience
Defining her role in the corporate world, Marianne likes to consider herself a ‘cultural engineer’. Most of her assignments came from organisations that wanted to explore new territories and /or wished to re-examine or redefine the company’s values and purpose in an everchanging environment. It’s obvious that sustainability in general and energy transition in particular played an important role in this respect. The same goes for social impact strategies, with the focus on the consequences of the corporate’s social responsibilities and social entreprises.
In this respect Marianne is (and has always been) an efficient bridge builder. A few examples:
- As CEO and pioneer of an organisation called Arts and Business, she brought together managers of these two worlds for a mutual benefit. She organised more than 600 projects on a national and international level and established the Code Cultural Government in the cultural world of the Netherlands.
- As CEO of Springtij Forum she annually assembled 800 ambitious decision-makers from the business world, prominent scientists, NGOs, governments, consumers, and citizens to share their latest insights and initiatives in the field of energy, food, climate, resources, agriculture, nature and the economy. It has grown into a high-profile platform for (inter) national energy transition.
- In India she worked as a consultant for a Dutch enterprise at the highest spiritual and political level with the aim of cleaning the water of the river Ganges.
- As a business consultant she connected the Netherlands’ most prestigious pension fund managers with representatives of sustainable companies (especially water ) in order to make a financial and investment shift in their stock portfolios. Recent assignments at a national level include financial-strategic issues for the Dutch National bank (DNB) using different lenses to assess risk management, learning to deal with risks in unexpected ways in order to be more prepared for crises
- In 2019 Marianne set up the establishment of a National Circular Economy Acceleration House on behalf of the Confederation of Dutch Industry and the Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment.
- In 2018/19 she helped establishing a national Implementation Programme on Culture and Behaviour of the changing role taking in the accountancy sector.
- As partner of the Setters’ company (UK) (2021/22) she recently trained 250 managers and workers in Malawi’s biggest sugar company Illovo with the aim of moving them to a more responsible conduct with the focus on security and risk management. In order to help the company, implement this culture change, Marianne sought the help of several drama teams that she instructed and guided. Her theatre background turned out to be very successful in this arena.
- Recently (2022) Marianne, commissioned by the Port of Rotterdam (one of the biggest ports in the world), connected the CEO’s of the ports of Rotterdam and Helsinki, Finland to examine the possibilities of a cooperation in the field of hydro-oxygen development.
