Lord Mark Price
Lord Mark Price is a businessman, speaker, writer and former government Minister of Trade. A former Managing Director of Waitrose, Deputy Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership and Chairman of Business in the Community, Mark has spent over forty years unlocking the power of people in organisations.
Mark is the president of the CMI and a board member of Coca Cola European Partners. He is passionate about creating engaged and happy workforces who in turn create longer-term sustainable success for organisations.
Lord Mark Price was the Managing Director of Waitrose and Deputy Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership. After over 30 years with John Lewis he went on to serve as a Minister for Trade and Investment, and later Trade Policy as a member of the House of Lords.
Mark joined John Lewis as a graduate trainee, quickly rising to store manager. He joined the company’s board as Development Director and shortly afterwards became Waitrose MD, a role he held for a 10 years. In his first six years he almost doubled the number of Waitrose stores across the country and further established the business as an influential brand leader in the highly competitive sector. Whilst serving as MD Mark also became the Deputy Chairman of the supermarket’s parent company, the John Lewis Partnership.
On leaving John Lewis, Lord Mark Price joined the House of Lords and was appointed a Minister of State for Trade. He advocated for business in government and represented national commercial interests abroad before and after the vote to leave the EU.
Once he left government he went on to write Fairness for All, a look at the social and economic importance for business to place employees at the centre of their values, inspired by his time at John Lewis but incorporating a variety of examples. He expanded on some of those themes in his book Six Steps to Workplace Happiness, whilst in Workplace Fables he considers broader examples of good, bad, and amusingly stupid practice in business offering salutatory lessons for anyone working in or leading a company.
As well as his John Lewis, government and writing work, Mark is the Chair of Fairtrade, the body striving to ensure suppliers and workers around the world are paid fairly and treated decently.
He is also the founder of WorkL for Business – a digital platform helping organisations manage and improve their workforce development and employee engagement. The platform offers market-leading employee engagement surveys, backed up by world-leading employee engagement data and delivering active action planning and development and learning for managers and employees.
Published in 2024, Mark’s latest book is Happy Economics and is the study of how employees’ happiness at work drives commercial and organisational performance. The quantitative data used in this book is drawn from the millions of WorkL ‘Happy at Work’ tests taken and supplemented by further insights from the more than 1,000 organisations WorkL works with.
SPEAKING TOPICS
Built on a lifetime of experience and backed by academic research, Mark knows that a happier and more engaged your workforce are, the more your organisation will flourish. Mark helps clients transform the way employees think about their work by giving them and their employers the framework, services and ideas they need to make meaningful change
