Jon Iwata

Jon has spent his career thinking about the character of institutions: what makes a company distinctive, how it earns trust and creates value, and how those things endure through change, or are lost in it.

Over a 35-year career at IBM, Jon held a number of senior leadership roles, including Senior Vice President and Chief Brand Officer, leading the company’s global marketing, communications, and corporate citizenship organization. He reported to three CEOs over two decades of significant transformation and chaired IBM’s Corporate Strategy and Values and Policy committees. Under his leadership of the marketing organization, IBM became, according to Interbrand, the second most valuable brand in the world.

Today, Jon is executive director of the Program on Stakeholder Innovation and Management at the Yale School of Management, where he is a Lecturer in the Practice of Management. Y-SIM studies how a company’s relationships with its stakeholders contribute to long-term economic value, drawing on more than 200 in-depth CEO interviews and company case studies.

Jon is executive chair of the Data & Trusted AI Alliance and chairman of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. An inductee of the Marketing and B2B halls of fame, he is co-inventor of a U.S. patent for a nanotechnology process for semiconductor lithography and fabrication.