Richard Forrest is the Global Sustainability Lead for Kearney, where he helps clients navigate the biggest challenge of their time, which is also the biggest opportunity. He has more than 25 years of experience across the energy and chemicals sectors globally, and he is a longstanding advocate of energy transition.
Forrest has successfully led numerous high-profile initiatives for leading companies, in particular driving high-impact global transformation, large-scale mergers, and distinctive strategy. He led Kearney’s global energy practice for six years, with a focus on helping clients address energy transition. During this time, he established the Energy Transition Institute within the firm and created a technology start-up (EV8) to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. He is now Chairman of the Board of both the A.T. Kearney Energy Transition Institute and EV8 Technologies.
Prior to Kearney, Forrest worked as a senior engineer for KBR and as an engineer for Bechtel Corporation. He served as a global board member at Kearney for six years on all committees, and he is currently the M&A Chair on the firm’s global leadership team. He earned an MBA from Cranfield School of Management and a master’s in chemical engineering from the University of Nottingham.
Areas of expertise
High impact global transformation, Large-scale merger, Distinctive strategy
Group Overview
Reducing your carbon footprint. Ensuring a sustainable, circular, and responsible supply chain. Championing equitable societies. Transforming to a sustainable business model. The demand for change can seem overwhelming, but right now the smart money is on sustainability. We can help you find innovative and enduring solutions toward a better way of doing business. Here’s how.
Our Energy Transition Institute was created to provide objective, relevant insights, and—ultimately—answers for reducing carbon emissions. It’s crucial work that moves you from keeping up to breaking through. Perhaps you know you need to transform your operations but don’t know where to begin. As the original operations firm, Kearney can help. Our work around the circular economy explores how to reuse everything (except the same old ideas), building resilience, driving efficiency, and reducing risk in new and exciting ways. If your challenges are more product-based, the Product Excellence and Renewal Lab (PERLab) is where we pull apart and redesign product portfolios from the ground up. We keep testing, refining, and reinventing your proposition until not only your products are sustainable but your business growth is too.
Sustainability is a shared ambition. We help you both collaborate with those in your value chain (without losing your place in it) and learn from peers, policymakers, social innovators, educators, and think tanks along the way.
Firm Overview
Since 1926, Kearney has been trusted advisors to the world’s foremost organizations and they continue to live by the principles established by their founder Andrew Thomas (Tom) Kearney so long ago: “Our success as consultants will depend on the essential rightness of the advice we give and our capacity for convincing those in authority that it is good.”
Kearney is a leading global management consulting firm with more than 4,200 people working in more than 40 countries. Kearney works with more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500, as well as with the most influential governmental and non-profit organizations.
Kearney is a partner-owned firm with a distinctive, collegial culture that transcends organizational and geographic boundaries—and it shows. Regardless of location or rank, Kearney’s consultants are down to earth, approachable, and have a shared passion for doing innovative client work that provides clear benefits to the organizations they work with in both the short and long term.
