Egos Aside at UN General Assembly 2026: Why the Next Era of Corporate Impact Will Be Built Together

My high school speech and debate teacher had a phrase she used constantly: “Egos aside, kiddos.”

She usually said it when we were helping one another prepare for a tournament (or when giving tough feedback on our performances). We would edit each other’s speeches, challenge arguments, share research and rehearse late into the afternoon. The irony, of course, was that come Saturday morning, some of the same people helping you sharpen your case might be sitting across from you in a competition room trying to beat you.

Her point was simple: competition didn’t have to prevent collaboration. In fact, helping one another get better made the entire team stronger.

Years later, I find myself thinking about that lesson as I talk with corporate, philanthropic, and nonprofit leaders about the state of social impact.

Because right now, we could use a little more “egos aside.”

Across corporate America, social impact, sustainability, workforce development, and philanthropic teams are being asked to do more with less. Budgets are tighter. Teams are leaner. Expectations, meanwhile, haven’t disappeared. Communities still need investment. Workers need new skills. Nonprofits need strong partners. Companies still want to demonstrate meaningful impact in the places where their employees and customers live.

The old model often encouraged every company to build its own initiative, create its own branded program, and measure its own impact.

Increasingly, that model doesn’t make sense.

The next era of corporate impact may be less about what any one company can build and more about what companies — even competitors — can build together.

We talk frequently in the social impact world about cross-sector partnerships: companies working alongside philanthropy, government, nonprofits, civil society, and other stakeholders to tackle shared challenges. Those partnerships remain essential.

But there is another kind of partnership we should be talking about more.

Sometimes the partners most needed at the table are the companies sitting across from one another in the marketplace.

There is a term for this: pre-competitive collaboration — companies within the same industry, or companies that depend on the same workforce, supply chains, or communities, working together on challenges where collective progress benefits everyone without eliminating the places where they still compete.

In other words, there are places where competition drives innovation. And there are places where competition simply creates duplication.

I was reminded of this recently in a conversation with the president of a major consumer packaged goods corporate foundation. We were talking about workforce development, particularly the challenge of preparing people for skilled manufacturing jobs.

Her company could certainly invest in training workers specifically for its own factories. But the skills needed on a modern manufacturing line aren’t unique to one brand. Similar companies need many of the same technicians, operators, and skilled workers.

So why should every company independently build essentially the same workforce pipeline?

Instead, competitors can help create a larger pool of skilled talent — supporting community colleges, credentialing programs, workforce organizations, and training providers together. One company may ultimately hire some of those workers. A competitor may hire others.

That isn’t a failure of the investment.
That is the point of the investment.

The community gains more residents with marketable skills and pathways to family-sustaining careers. Employers gain access to a stronger regional talent pool. Workers gain skills that are portable rather than tied to a single company.

And everyone benefits from an ecosystem that no single employer could have built as effectively alone.

We are already seeing versions of this approach across industries.

Consider plastic waste. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Keurig Dr Pepper compete fiercely for consumers every day. Yet through the Every Bottle Back initiative, the companies have worked together with environmental and circular-economy organizations to invest in recycling infrastructure and improve plastic bottle collection. The companies remain competitors at the grocery store. But recycling infrastructure is a systems problem, and building three parallel recycling systems would make little sense.

Or look at foodservice packaging. Starbucks and McDonald’s — two companies that certainly compete for the same morning coffee customer — became founding partners of the NextGen Consortium, working together to develop and scale more sustainable food packaging. Coca-Cola, Wendy’s, Yum! Brands, and others have also participated. The premise is powerful: some innovations become more viable when an industry helps create the market for them together.

And within the consumer goods industry, companies are collaborating on systemic challenges such as human rights, sustainable agriculture and global supply chains — issues too large, interconnected, and embedded across common supplier networks for any individual company to solve independently.

Foundations and philanthropists are increasingly recognizing the same opportunity. The Gates Foundation, for example, has made collaborative philanthropy an explicit part of its approach — helping bring donors and philanthropic organizations together around shared priorities rather than assuming every funder needs to operate independently. Its Philanthropic Partnerships team points to a growing ecosystem of more than 400 collaborative funds that allow funders to combine capital, expertise and relationships to make bigger bets on common challenges. And we are seeing that philosophy translate into action: the Gates Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, and Wellcome committed a combined $300 million to work together on interconnected global health challenges.

Others are embracing the same spirit through broader partnerships, such as in the mental health space. The Huntsman Mental Health Foundation has made collaboration central to its approach, working across donors, companies, academic institutions, and communities to align efforts and increase collective impact around mental and brain health. The Rare Impact Fund offers another model: Rare Beauty contributes 1% of its sales to the fund, while the fund raises additional resources from foundations, corporate partners, individuals, and the community toward a goal of mobilizing $100 million for youth mental health. Rather than building one proprietary solution, it directs that collective capital across a network of nonprofit organizations addressing different parts of the youth mental health ecosystem. And companies such as lululemon are increasingly joining forces around the issue as well.

Different models, but the underlying idea is the same: no funder needs to own the solution for its capital to help scale it. The lesson for companies is similar to the lesson funders are learning: sometimes the most powerful thing you can do with your resources isn’t to build another initiative with your name on it. It’s to align your capital with others and make the collective effort big enough to matter.

This is where pre-competitive collaboration becomes particularly powerful. Companies can pool resources, expertise, information, and influence around a shared challenge. They can aggregate demand for new solutions. They can help establish common standards. And perhaps most importantly, they can invest together in the shared infrastructure and ecosystems that each company ultimately depends upon.

The question is not whether companies should stop competing.

Of course they should compete.

Companies should compete on products, customers, ideas, talent, and innovation. Competition drives progress.

But we should be asking a different question when it comes to the communities and systems surrounding those businesses:

What if solving this problem together creates more value than solving it separately?

Workforce development is an obvious example. So are affordable housing, climate resilience, education, mental health, food insecurity, digital access, and responsible AI.

These problems do not recognize corporate boundaries.

And when resources are constrained, fragmentation becomes increasingly difficult to justify. Five companies investing separately in five small programs may produce five annual reports. Five companies combining resources, expertise, relationships, and hiring power might actually change a regional workforce system.

This requires something harder than writing a check.

It requires companies to share credit.

It requires philanthropy to think beyond branded programs.

It requires nonprofits to be positioned not simply as grant recipients, but as conveners and strategic partners.

And sometimes it requires sitting at a table with the company whose logo normally appears next to yours on a competitive landscape slide and asking: What could we accomplish together that neither of us can accomplish alone?

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That question is particularly relevant as leaders from business, philanthropy, government, and nonprofits prepare to converge on New York this September for the United Nations General Assembly.

At Landmark Ventures and Social Innovation Summit, we are building our own UNGA-week gatherings around exactly this idea: that convening is valuable not simply because interesting people are in the room, but because of what those people might build together after they leave it.

Through Landmark Ventures’ UNGA programming at unga.landmarkventures.com and our SIS Salon @ Yankee Stadium on the Future of Impact at futureofimpact.socialinnovation.com, we are bringing together leaders across business, philanthropy, nonprofits, technology, and government for conversations designed around relationships, shared challenges, and practical collaboration.

That is also why we believe so much in bringing peers into the same room. Cross-sector partnerships matter enormously. But sometimes the breakthrough comes when two leaders who compete for the same customers, talent, or market share discover that they are also trying to solve the same workforce challenge, investing in the same communities, or confronting the same systemic barrier.

Perhaps they don’t need two solutions.

Perhaps they need one bigger one.

Because perhaps the most important question at gatherings like UNGA isn’t, “What is your organization doing?”

It is: “What could we be doing together?”

My speech and debate teacher understood something years ago that corporate leaders may need to rediscover now.

You can compete tomorrow.

Today, there is value in helping each other get better.

Egos aside, kiddos.

See you at UN General Assembly.