Founder & CEO

Simon is the Founder and CEO of Adapt with Intent Inc., a boutique consulting firm that works with leaders, educators, and organizations to reframe their thinking and redesign new ways of working across life stages. Adapt with Intent focuses on the intersection of longevity and work and how we might adapt careers, work systems, and what “retirement” might look like. Simon leverages his deep expertise in the future of work, innovation, and the dynamics of the longevity economy to support senior leadership teams in developing a longevity strategy to unlock new opportunities by reimagining the customer and workplace structures required to support 100-year lives.

Simon is a talent and innovation executive with over 25 years of experience working across multiple sectors including financial services, technology, academia, and not-for-profit. Prior to founding Adapt with Intent Inc. in 2022, Simon was Vice-President of Talent, Academy, and Future of Work at Communitech, a globally recognized innovation hub where he spearheaded talent attraction and learning initiatives for over 1,600 companies ranging from start-ups to global enterprises. Before joining the tech industry, Simon was the head of strategy, product, and investments for Manulife’s group retirement, benefits, retail wealth, and insurance businesses.

Simon holds a Master of Business Administration from Wilfrid Laurier University, and he now serves as Vice-Chair of the university board of governors. He also holds CFP (Certified Financial Planner) and CPRC (Certified Professional Retirement Coach) designations. Simon can often be found in a basketball gym coaching the next generation, reading a book in a local coffee shop, and cycling on trails across Ontario. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, with his wife, Erin.

Chief Design Officer

Kyra Jones is the Chief Design Officer at Adapt with Intent, specializing in collaborative approaches to redesign work and education for 100+ year lives. Kyra works with leaders, educators, and organizations to generate new ways of working and learning that support reinvention throughout our life course.

Kyra has spent her career working with people as they transform through immersive learning and development experiences, from students pursuing post-secondary education to leaders at some of the world's largest organizations. For over 10 years, Kyra has been on a mission to transform what it feels like to learn and develop throughout our lives and cultivate space to bring the best of ourselves to the work we do. She has advanced this important work taking on roles in higher education at Wilfrid Laurier University and University of Waterloo, leading the Deloitte Greenhouse in Kitchener-Waterloo, and working with startup and scaling organizations as VP, Organizational Development & Culture at Communitech, a globally recognized innovation hub.

With a background in research, higher education, consulting, and innovation, Kyra is a seasoned strategist and designer. Kyra has a PhD in Biology, a B.Ed in Adult Education, and a BSc and brings a deep knowledge of living systems to her work.

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is CEO of 20-first, a global consulting firm working with companies interested in capturing the competitive advantage of gender, nationality, and generational balance. Since 2005, she has worked around the globe with the CEOs, Executive Committees and top management teams of some of the world’s best-known companies to capture the business opportunities of more balanced, 21st century forms of leadership, customer connections and talent management.
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Her ground-breaking thought leadership has featured in The New York Times, BBC, Le Monde, FT, Der Spiegel and is accessible through several seminal books and regular contributions to Harvard Business Review and Forbes. She is an acclaimed speaker on ‘gender bilingual’ leadership, marketing and talent management issues across the globe and has done several TEDx talks. She has been recognized by ELLE Magazine as one of the Top 40 Women Leading Change and was recently celebrated by PWN Global with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Gender Balanced Leadership.

Why Women Mean Business was awarded the MANPOWER Best Book of the Year Prize and her impactful book 7 Steps to Leading a Gender Balanced Business is used by many global leaders as a roadmap to balance.

By nationality Canadian, French and Swiss, she has an MBA from INSEAD and is a graduate of the University of Toronto. She lives in London with her sculptor husband and is occasionally visited by her two, globe-trotting, gender-balanced children, a son and daughter.

Mike Drak is a thirty-eight-year veteran of the financial services industry. He started his own Victory Lap in 2014 and is currently working with his wife, an investment advisor, helping her clients design their own fulfilling retirement lifestyles.

Mike is a best-selling author, award winning blogger, public speaker and retirement lifestyle designer.  His retirement blog articles can be found at Booming Encore.

His best seller “Victory Lap Retirement” was based on the realization that traditional full stop retirement doesn’t work for most people anymore due to increasing longevity. The book presents a new life model better suited to today’s reality.

His follow up book "Retirement Heaven or Hell: Which Will You Choose?" shares some of Mike’s personal experiences in retirement and highlights how people can design and transition to their own unique retirement lifestyle. This book also outlines the valuable retirement lessons learned from the pandemic and introduces nine retirement principles that can support creating a long, healthy and fulfilling life.