“Growth Through Care”
November 2025 | Economics of Mutuality Leaders Stories
A Conversation with Anna Dibner
Anna Dibner built her career across marketing, strategy, and new business development roles. In the early years, she learned to navigate the pressures of high performance and efficiency that define much of modern business. The more she advanced, the more she began to aspire for alignment between the values that motivated her and the business goals.
“Even when we were achieving short term growth,” she recalls. “often the outcomes weren’t meaningful or sustainable.”
That realization marked a turning point. It sparked a search for a different way of leading and creating value, one that placed people, relationships, and shared purpose at the center of growth.
Working across industries and cultures of emerging and developed markets, she saw how organizations and teams thrive when they build trust, empower teams, and connect their goals to a broader sense of impact. “Purpose became not a slogan,” she reflects, “but a strategic question: what are we really here to do together?”
Bringing Purpose into Practice at Royal Canin
That question continues to guide Anna in her role as Global Pet Owner Experience and Ecosystem Growth Director at Royal Canin, a company within Mars that has long placed purpose at the heart of its mission. Royal Canin’s work revolves around improving the health and well-being of cats and dogs through nutrition, science, and partnership with veterinarians and pet professionals around the world.
For Anna, this environment offers a living example of how purpose can drive sustainable growth. “When we think of growth through the lens of wellbeing,” she says, “we see that mutual value can be tangible, measurable, and deeply human.”
Her focus is on growth that benefits the entire ecosystem: pet owners, partners, employees, and the pets themselves. She describes Royal Canin’s approach as one built on listening and learning, both to scientific insight and to the lived experience of those who care for pets every day. “Growth happens when we connect knowledge with empathy,” she says. “That connection builds trust, and trust is what sustains impact and brings business results.”
The Art of Listening
Throughout her career, listening and observation have remained one of Anna’s defining practices. She sees it as a powerful tool for alignment and innovation. “Listening is one of the most underestimated capability in leadership,” she explains. “It’s not passive. It’s an active way of creating understanding and allowing something new to emerge.”
At Royal Canin, this shows up in how teams collaborate across functions and geographies. Anna encourages dialogue anchored in curiosity and respect that goes beyond business metrics to explore meaning and purpose. “When people feel heard,” she notes, “they bring ideas that can transform the business. They see themselves as co-creators rather than operators.”
This relational way of working is helping her teams better connect global growth objectives with local realities. “Our work touches so many lives, pets and human,” she says. “That brings a responsibility to grow with awareness of the ecosystems we’re part of.”
A Broader Lens on Value
Anna’s engagement with the Economics of Mutuality (EoM) movement happened through the Executive Education program Leading With Purpose, where she joined leaders from across sectors to explore how businesses can create value that benefits people, communities, and the planet alongside profit.
The course offered her a language to describe what she had been observing in practice: the idea that value must extend beyond profit to include social, human, and environmental well-being – an idea that resonated deeply with her leadership philosophy.
“What EoM emphasizes is that business is an ecosystem,” she says. “When each part of that system is healthy, the whole becomes more resilient and thriving. That’s true for organizations, and it’s true for society.”
The EoM approach helped Anna integrate purpose and performance in practical ways. It reinforced her belief that value creation must include social, human, and environmental outcomes. “The conversations in the course were both philosophical and concrete,” she explains. “They grounded purpose in business reality and made it more actionable.”
She now applies this systems perspective to how Royal Canin approaches growth acceleration through the pet owner experience and digital innovation. Success, in her view, depends on aligning measurable outcomes with meaning. “Metrics are essential,” she acknowledges. “But they need to serve the purpose, not replace it.” There are three types of questions she asks her teams: What is the value we create for pets? What is the value we create for pet professionals and our ecosystem? If we do it successfully what is the value that we capture for our business?
Growth Through Care
As Anna looks to the future, she sees opportunities for companies like Royal Canin to model what she calls “growth through care.” It is a form of growth that honors relationships and the interdependence between people, pets, and the planet.
“People want to work for organizations that reflect their values,” she says. “They want to know that the work they do contributes to something real. When a company creates that connection, it doesn’t just perform better, it becomes a community aligned around common purpose.”
Her journey, from early corporate lessons to leadership at Royal Canin, reflects a shift taking place across business today: a movement toward mutual value as both a mindset and a practice.
“For me,” Anna concludes, “it all comes back to how we grow. Growth that fosters wellbeing and helps key elements of the ecosystem thrive, is growth that lasts.”
Are you a leader with a deep conviction that business should be a force for good? Our Leading With Purpose executive education program could for you.
Delivered online over 9-weeks, the course is grounded in the practical Economics of Mutuality operating model, which has been developed with leading companies and universities including Mars and Oxford University’s Saïd Business School.
Since its inception, it has helped over 500 senior business leaders and investors integrate social and environmental impact into their core business strategy.
Applications are open for our 2026 cohort! Find out more via link below.
Program dates: April 20 – June 26
Application deadline: March 20
If you want to speak to a member of our team about joining the program, please contact Liam Sharkey at liam.sharkey@mutualvaluelabs.com
