Dr Andrew Forrest AO awarded 2025 Progress Medal for Leadership

Fortescue Executive Chairman and Founder Dr Andrew Forrest AO has been presented with a 2025 Progress Medal by the Society for Progress, recognising his leadership in advancing business models that integrate economic performance with long-term progress for people and the natural world. 

The Progress Medal was presented to Dr Forrest by Salesforce co-founder, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff, a recipient of the medal, and World Economic Forum Co-Chair and Vice Chairman of Roche Holding AG André Hoffmann at a ceremony at the World Economic Forum on Thursday. 

The Progress Medals honour scholars and business leaders whose work advances models of capitalism to better integrate economic performance with fairness, wellbeing and the natural world. 

Dr Forrest was one of four leaders and three scholars to receive the 2025 award, with the citation recognising his “daring and innovative commitment to defend and advance, from within the private enterprise system, the rights and interests of humans and nature”. 

Dr Forrest said he was deeply humbled to receive the award. 

“Business has a moral obligation to act in the long-term interests of humanity and the planet – alongside a responsibility to deliver durable economic value,” Dr Forrest said. 

“I don’t believe the world changes through appeals to conscience alone, but through the power of business. When capital is deployed well, it can drive innovation, productivity and enhance the natural world. 

“In the world as it is, there is one constant: the ongoing struggle between good and evil. The Progress Medal recognises the responsibility of business to ensure that in that struggle, its power is used to make sure good prevails.” 

“This honour belongs to the 25,000 people across Fortescue, the Minderoo Foundation and Tattarang who live and breathe this every day - whether it is inventing and deploying new technologies to decarbonise heavy industry or deploying capital, and influence to protect what matters and strengthen the systems the world relies on.”

About the Society for Progress

The Society for Progress was initiated in 2013 by Subi Rangan, professor of strategy at INSEAD, the global business school, and Ebba Hansmeyer, its founding director.

The Society for Progress is an academically diverse and independent group of scholars and leaders. Its work is based on the belief that integrating perspectives from moral philosophy and moral psychology will help evolve the decentralized economic system (“capitalism”) in a manner that better integrates market and society, humans and nature, and the present and the future.

In particular, the Society aspires to contribute to and catalyse rigorous research on how enterprises and all economic actors may better and more systematically integrate performance and progress (see Performance & Progress: Essays in Business, Society, and Capitalism, Oxford University Press, 2015; Capitalism Beyond Mutuality?, OUP, 2018; and Core Assumptions in Business Theory: A Wedge between Performance & Progress, OUP, 2025).

The work of developing better models, methods, and measures for integrating performance and progress can scarcely be accomplished by one mind or even a college of intellectuals. Contributions must come from the best and brightest around the world, and the ideas must be absorbed and developed further not just by policy makers and intellectuals but especially by scholars of enterprise, students of enterprise, and leaders of enterprise. It is in this spirit that the Society for Progress Medals are conceived and awarded. 

About INSEAD

INSEAD is one of the world’s leading and largest graduate business schools, with campuses and centers in France, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and San Francisco.

The school brings together people, cultures, and ideas to change lives and to transform organizations. A global perspective and diverse viewpoints are reflected in all aspects of the school’s research and teaching.

INSEAD’s ethos is encapsulated in its motto: “The Business School for the World.”