Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Claire Sullivan: All right everybody. Thanks for coming. My name is Claire. I work downstairs in the SOS Advising Office, and this is Bruno Sarda. We actually do teach a class together. I think it’s called Creating Career Success and Sustainability.

Bruno is the Director of Sustainability for Dell, and he actually has a really unique relationship with the School Sustainability here. He’s a graduate of ASU, and he provides student worker positions through Dell here. Actually, they sit over here across from Sander’s office on the fourth floor, and so he’s here on campus pretty much every day on the fourth floor.

He is here to talk a little bit about how to navigate careers in corporate sustainability, so especially the idea that this is probably where a lot of jobs are gonna be created, and maybe overcoming some of the perceptions that students might have about what sustainability means in the corporate world. I’ll let you take it from here.

Bruno Sarda: All right, thanks, Claire.

Sullivan: Sure.

Sarda: I’m all wired, sorry, but we’ll make it work. Thanks for being here. We’ll talk about corporate sustainability. I figured what I’d probably do is start by talking a bit more broadly, cause the more I spend time in this school, the more I realize there’s a lot of misconceptions about the roles of corporations, and in fact, the kinds of things that happen.

Again, I work for Dell. I’m not actually the Director of Overall Sustainability. I run what we call Sustainability Operations, which is all of the business underpinnings of the sustainability programs at Dell, on the social and environmental side. My boss runs all of sustainability, including both social and environmental strategy, but I run kind of what we would consider all of the business integration, business operations, governance, et cetera.

I work for Dell. We’re founder led. We’re one of those companies that has a strong guiding founder, and Michael often talks like this, [laughter] where he says things like, “Technology, at the end of the day, is only good if it’s extending the reach of us humans, and specifically around enabling human potential.” That guides everything that we do, and that’s how Michael, who has a very strong personal passion actually for sustainability, has guided our efforts in the company now for several years to really lead our industry in this space.

This is just context, to give you a sense of why does a global IT company kind of care about some of these things, so part of it is just cultural. Part of it is just kind of the mission that is defined by the founder.

Part of also what I’ll couch my comments in is that we’re quite a different company today than we were five years ago. Five years ago, actually, is when we set a lot of goals around environmental performance. We set both absolute and relative emission targets, water consumption targets, energy intensity, waste, et cetera, but we actually look quite a bit different.

First of all, we’ve grown a certain number in size, but our model actually has changed dramatically. We used to be mostly a PC company, and in fact, still many people think Dell is a PC company, and even often a consumer PC company. The fact is, consumer business is less than 20 percent of our total sales, and actually less than five percent of our profit globally.

Nowadays, we’re primarily what you would call an IT solutions company. We do almost, again, all of our business in the corporate and public sector. Actually, we just released our annual earnings  a few days ago. We did 30 percent of our revenue last year from actually IT services, so this isn’t even selling stuff. It’s selling basically talent, people’s services, not hardware. We’ve acquired a bunch of companies, actually about 15 companies in the last 18 months or so, mostly, again, in kind of what we would call the commercial stack in software security, storage, networking.

More and more of our business is actually now in the datacenter, rather than at the individual laptop and desktop. We still sell a lot of those, it’s just because the prices have come down so much from a percentage of revenue perspective, it’s smaller. Then in datacenters, it used to be that we had datacenters for our own use, like just ASU has its own datacenters to power all the applications that you use.

In fact, about 90 percent of the hardware in ASU’s datacenter is Dell, but more and more, actually, we’re building datacenters for external consumption, what’s known as cloud computing, so selling IT capacity without selling the hardware that goes with it. We’re in the process of building some very large datacenters around the world, so just some context.

Sustainability; what do we look at? At the end of the day, any corporation that pays attention to sustainability will go through what’s called materiality assessment, which is, at the end of the day, what are the things that are relevant to my business, both in terms of the impacts that I generate, as well as the things that could potentially come and impact my operations in one way or another?

Just at a high level, again, energy is a very big deal for us. We sell things that get plugged in in order to run, and again, if we’re not selling the thing, we’re selling the service that runs on the thing, [laughter] so without energy, we would not have a whole lot of things to make money with. Energy; both the cost of energy, the supply of energy, how energy is sourced, things like now what you’re seeing in the UK and Australia and other places, the taxation of energy consumption through carbon taxes, and what that means to some of our large customers.

Certainly in the supply chain, you’ve seen a lot of news recently about some things like labor issues in the electronic supply chain, but also materials, certainly carbon, but also water, for example. We’re not a very water-intensive company. Some of our suppliers are, like Intel is our largest supplier. They rely heavily on water, and often they get asked, “Why do you work in Arizona so much?” but they actually have a good answer for that.

Certainly the policy, we could all, I think, agree that there’s been a certain lack of cohesion around policy making relative to sustainability, but there’s actually a lot of stuff happening and in weird places; things like for us, the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is not a legislative body, but a regulatory body, is now requiring some disclosures from publicly traded companies in the U.S. relative to the use of conflict materials in electronics.

Similar to things like Sarbanes-Oxley, again, that start with a good intent, often can be perceived as just an administrative answer to the wrong question; things like California now has its own disclosure on slavery and human trafficking. Again, these are very real questions. The problem sometimes is that when you have multiple legislative regulatory entities that start creating their own version of what they think is right, it creates actually a lot of complexity inside an organization, and frankly burden.

E-waste is a great example, I think. We’re now managing to over 60 different legislations or regulations around the world, including in the States. Well, there’s nothing at a national level yet, but some states have passed standards, some counties, some cities; like the City of Santa Clara recently decided to have their own standard for how e-waste should be processed.

Again, that creates problems, so those things matter to us, and procurement requirements. We do a lot of business, almost 30 percent of our revenue, in the public sector, so government, education like ASU, healthcare. A lot of requirements are coming from these types of organizations around what they expect, both the products they buy, but also the suppliers they buy from, to adhere to.

Then certainly, more and more in the corporate space as well. About two or three years ago, I’d say maybe a third of large proposals, so RFPs or requests for proposals, so when you’re bidding on a very large deal with a corporation, about a third maybe had some social or environmental criteria. Today, it’s about two-thirds and growing fast. Then something again that’s a trend, and not a bad one, is that actually there is a lot more awareness at the CEO/CFO level in corporations around the globe, on both what this means to their business and what they expect from their suppliers.

Something else, of course, for us is things like shareholder resolutions. Actually, last year, about 40 percent of all shareholder resolutions that were proposed had something to do with corporate responsibility. A shareholder resolution is you can have either activist groups, investor groups, unions, whoever; actually, anybody who owns shares in the company, or at least a certain number of shares, can try to propose a shareholder resolution to be voted on by all shareholders.

Companies hate them, because they’re actually pretty disruptive. They create a lot of cost and, frankly, they usually come with some kind of a message of, “The leadership of the company’s not dealing with this; therefore, we need to put something to the vote of the shareholders.” The support for these types of proposals has doubled in the last five years.

In fact, what’s considered a critical threshold – sometimes something gets proposed by one very nichey activist group and three percent of shareholders will say, “Yeah,” so that’s three percent – but what’s considered critical, in terms of management, really being able to say, “This is enough of a problem,” you can see here, has grown from about three percent to almost a third in the last few years. Again, this is a big deal. This is stuff management doesn’t want and they’re hearing loud and clear from their shareholders.

Just to give you a sense, again, of the kinds of things we pay attention to, we care about. We talked about energy earlier. In the next four years, the bandwidth per rack – so again, this is a rack of servers in a datacenter. The bandwidth per rack, the concentration of computing performance, and therefore sometimes energy consumption, is gonna increase 25X. Datacenters can easily consume 100 times or more energy than the offices they serve.

We are seeing clearly a trend that energy management is gonna become an enterprise level discipline. Think of other enterprise level disciplines, like human resources, like finance, like legal. This idea of managing energy at an enterprise level is coming and it’s coming fast, and what that means, of course, for companies that sell energy intensive products or solutions, is that this matters.

Another one, so we’ve talked about big data and its impact on things like datacenters, resource consumption, device proliferation, all of that. Just in the past month, 30 billion pieces of content added to Facebook. IT traffic; so Internet traffic is gonna quadruple in the next three years. We think already [laughter] it’s big, but it’s gonna get four times bigger in a very short amount of time.

About 107 trillion emails; I think about half of those were mine, and most of which are spam, but this idea frankly, that there’s more and more of an expectation, whether it’s on our phones, whether it’s on our TVs, whether it’s on our even appliances; smart meters, the proliferation of this kind of always on, anywhere, anytime is becoming an expectation. The fact is, is that we have to scale efficiently.  We can’t reach these numbers by just quadrupling the amount of resource use; we can’t.

By the way, I’m gonna talk for a while, and then we’ll have plenty of time for discussion and questions, so if there’s something that just really hits you and want to ask, ask, but otherwise, we’ll have plenty of time.

Social networking’s another one. I mean, obviously, we’re all some kind of social networking users. Again, almost two billion people on the Internet now. A third of them are on Facebook. Twitter, which you thought might have plateaued last year, in fact grew 50 percent in the past year. The number of tweets has tripled.

About 25 percent of the most active web addresses on the web are social and, of course, wherever you see people, you see pickpockets and the likes, and that’s what cybercrime is. Two billion videos watched on YouTube yesterday; 70,000 photos uploaded to Facebook in the past minute. It’d say a good chunk of those were my daughter’s. [Laughter]

The fact is, social networking for us, ignoring it is not an option; one, because of the scale of it, but frankly, because of its reach. Again, it’s so ubiquitous now that the perception of large businesses is formed, maybe sometimes lost, in the social sphere, and so all these things matter.

What we’ve heard, frankly, from our own customers – we’ve done some research – is actually, they want their IT solutions providers to help them along their journey of sustainability. We did some analysis of our largest corporate and public customers.  91 percent of them had some publicly stated objectives to reduce the impact of their own operations. Again, that’s usually their energy or emissions; some it’s water, some it’s waste, depending on the impact of their business.

More than half of them said specifically, they’re looking to their suppliers to help them meet these objectives they stated. Again, when we look at sustainability, it’s no longer just, “What can we do?” but it’s also, “What can we help our customer’s do?” cause then it’s really starting to weave into how we do business.

Just, again, an interesting number, and then I’ll be done with the stats. Dantex, which is a research firm, estimates that just in the U.S., the sustainable business spend was about $28 billion and it’s expected to double in the next two years. Again, this is money that companies are spending on reducing their emissions and energy footprint, their waste operations, innovating, human capital still at a billion dollars; not huge, but that’s expected to grow relatively fast as well.

All right, so bringing it back. What we do, again, is trying to put the lens of, “How can we create long-term stakeholder value?” Not just shareholder value, but stakeholders, which include customers, employees, communities in which we do business, et cetera, and looking at the both economic, social and environmental aspects, to make sure that those are all considered in everything we do.

We take kind of a life cycle approach, let’s say; so where do we operate? What is it that we do? We design things, we make them, we ship them, they get used, and then somehow they get back into the cycle in one way or another. I’ll walk through quickly, again, just to give you a flavor of the kinds of things we do. As an example, I’ll touch a little bit on what other companies do, and then we’ll talk about, so what does this mean from a career planning and pathing perspective?

When we design products, first of all, we work very closely with our suppliers to eliminate substances of concern, so things like now 100 percent of our LED panels are mercury free. Not all LED panels are mercury free; ours are. Eliminate things like brominated flame retardants or some PVCs or other things. We don’t make a lot of things that go into our product.

We buy microchips from Intel. We buy hard drives from Samsung or Hitachi. We’ll buy screens from – so we don’t made the underlying components. That’s not our core competency, so we work closely with our suppliers to make sure that by the time we had a finished product, it’s not only compliant with the strictest regulations in place, but actually going beyond that.

Certainly, energy efficiency is huge, and we’ll touch on that in a little bit. Again, not only for ourselves, but we work very closely actually with the Sustainability Consortium here down the street, but also a bunch of other groups globally, to make sure that those principles actually go into the global electronic supply chain, not just into our product.

Then actually, this is something we’ve done for a long time, but it’s really to design with disassembly in mind. Some products that you can buy on the market today will look very cool and very slick, but you give them to a refurbisher and recycler, and they’re like, “Oh, my gosh.” Either it takes forever to disassemble it, or sometimes some things are very hard to decouple and to reuse. We actually design with disassembly in mind, which is part of why we have the most elaborate, actually, take-back and recycling program in the world for electronics, is because it’s actually economically viable to do so.

From a building perspective, again, there’s a couple of things. One, there’s our own operations. We run facilities, businesses. We employ over a thousand people. We have a strong commitment to renewable power. In fact, on a global level, about 21 percent of our power is sourced from renewable sources. It was as high as 28 percent a couple of years ago, but actually, I mentioned we acquired a bunch of companies, so we’re in the process of changing some of the sourcing for these facilities, et cetera.

We’re hoping to get back several of our buildings, including our Central Texas facilities, at around 100 percent green power. Several of our other large facilities are 80 to 100, but then we have a bunch of small, either sales offices or otherwise, that are sometimes either leased or it’s harder to get to that, but we buy as much as we can.

Also, working very much like ASU on a zero waste initiative. We’re at almost 96 percent recycled or reuse in our operational waste, and then things like we’ve been reporting to CDP the carbon disclosure projects since 2003. Actually, we’ve reported to CDP Water, since it’s inception. Actually, our first environmental progress report – it’s still available on our website – was released in 1998, so we’ve been at this for a bit.

This responsible operations is very much a part of what we do, but it’s also more and more, obviously, working with our suppliers. A lot of the stuff we make actually is made by others, including the likes of Foxconn, that happened in the news lately. We work closely with our industry partners, so both our competitors – actually, we work closely with our competitors, but also our suppliers, to both develop, and then enforce industry-wide rules.

We were founding members of the Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition, the EICC, that sets the standard and is basically what everybody is auditing to, including Apple now. They weren’t for a while, but now they’re using the EICC as the foundation for their audits.

Sharing best practices; again, we’ve brought in, for example, our HR departments into our suppliers to help them set up employee assistance programs. For example, some complaints in our supply chain were lack of getting a statement that says how many hours you worked that you were paid for, those kinds of things. Again, depending; we work with very large suppliers like Intel or Microsoft. We also work with smaller organizations in countries where there might not always be the same level of expectation or requirements, and then again, we encourage transparency in reporting.

Actually, we require all of our Tier I suppliers to report to the Carbon Disclosure Project, and actually we had 100 percent participation; the only company in CDP to have the 100 percent participation. It’s a first step, just to encourage transparency. The more you shine a light on something, the more it’s likely to improve.

In terms of shipping, we’ve actually made a lot of investment into packaging. We’ve heard from our customers that actually packaging is a big deal, and we all care about packaging things we buy at the store, but imagine being a datacenter buying tens of thousands of servers, or being a large company, again, ordering hundreds or thousands of laptops or flat panels.

All of a sudden, [laughter] you start seeing packaging becomes a big issue, especially if it’s the kind of packaging that’s gonna cost you money to dispose of, like things like Styrofoam, et cetera, and you can’t just toss it anymore. We’ve developed all kinds of models for specifically, how do we reduce our packaging footprint with a specific goal to eliminate 20,000,000 pounds of packaging by 2012, even though we’re a growing a company?

Pioneering things; like this is actually a bamboo-based packaging that’s 100 percent recyclable and compostable from actually rapidly renewable, sustainable bamboo that’s FSC certified. This is actually mushroom-based packaging. It’s a bit heavier, so we use it. This our multipack, where ship a bunch of servers. This box might have $100,000 worth of equipment, but this packaging is really, really interesting, where it’s actually basically agricultural byproduct bound with mycelium or kind of a mushroom, and when you’re done with it, you can literally crumble it and toss it in your yard. There’s not a single chemical in it, and it’s, again, been certified 100 percent compostable or recyclable for that reason.

Again, this is a visual that our packaging folks love, [laughter] but their focus is again what they call “cube, curb and contents.” Cube is reducing the size of the average package, so that again, obviously, there’s less material. Curb is what’s the percentage of the stuff we sell that’s actually curb recyclable or compostable, and then making sure that we keep increasing the amount of recycled content in our packaging. As we go through these, you kind of get a sense for all the different types of jobs and skillsets that are needed to run all of these programs, cause obviously, this stuff can get pretty scientific.

Shipping; actually, a lot of our customers are now asking to choose. For example, some customers say they are willing to place their orders with a longer lead time, in order to guarantee sea shipping, as opposed to air shipping, which obviously has a smaller footprint. These are things we actually built in our supply chain, that we can give a customer the choice of how their products are shipped, and they love that. All of the shippers we use in the U.S. certainly are EPA SmartWay, which again you have to qualify to be a SmartWay shipper based on how you operate.

In terms of the use phase of the product, again, we’ve reduced the energy use of the products we sell, like desktops and laptops, actually by 25 percent from ’08 to 2011. Before that, the three years before that, we had achieved about another 20 percent or so. In the datacenter, actually, we’ve achieved a 31X increase in performance per watt, so again, this is how much computing can you do with the same amount of energy use, but also things like virtualizing machines.

We’ve actually, for example, one case study we have where a customer had over 100 datacenters. They weren’t large, but there were 100 unique centers they were using, and we consolidated them down to three; again, from what it takes to operate, what it takes to power it, to back up, some of the backup generators, etc., and then a lot of actually functionality in the product to give our customers the ability to manage power consumption; things like they can automatically shut stuff off at night when people aren’t there, not necessarily waiting for the employee to do it.

Last in our kind of cycle, is this idea of recycling. Again, we’ve invested a lot. We’ve been at this for a while. We have by far the most widely deployed take-back and recycling program. We now offer free take-back and recycling of any brand, actually, not just Dell, in over 80 countries.

In almost 40 countries, we offer an additional service to business customers called Asset Recovery Services, which includes third-party verified data destruction, so that if, for example, we work a lot of with governments, with departments of defense, with healthcare organizations. They want to make sure that the data that’s on their machines is treated properly.

Just actually in 2010, which we reported last year for the year before, we recycled over 150,000,000 pounds. We have a goal of doing a billion by 2014, and we’re already over 600,000,000 pounds of that, so we’re probably gonna exceed this goal probably by next year. Actually, our things are getting smaller too, so in terms of weight, [laughter] everything we collect starts getting smaller and smaller.

Then in the U.S., a great success story. We partnered with Goodwill on this Reconnect program, and there’s actually, it says 2,200. About a month ago, we expanded that to there’s now about 2,600 Goodwill locations that basically run this Reconnect program. They’ve been able to create about 250 jobs to manage this program.

They manage to actually refurbish and resell a lot of what they get, cause most of what they get is not actually not that old, and there’s a whole second market for it, for especially the typical Goodwill customer, who might not have $300.00 or $400.00 or $500.00 for a new computer, and might get something for $75.00 or $100.00, but again, it’s something Goodwill got for free and didn’t get to put too much money into. If they can’t refurbish or resell, they can potentially reuse some of the parts, and if not, it’s recycled responsibly.

Okay, so that was kind of a very high-level overview for a lot of work that a lot of people are involved in. I’ll tell you just briefly, the corporate sustainability team that I’m on, I often call it the central column. All the work we talked about so far lives in functional centers of expertise, so we have people in the procurement side dealing with suppliers and shippers, people in the product engineering side in our services groups and facilities management, et cetera.

We work with all of those folks around the company, but what we do at the heart, in the corporate sustainability team; one, we develop and guide strategy. So both we define kind of, “Where do we need to go? How does it align to what we do as a business? What’s the business case for it? Who do we need to partner to make it happen?”

We work a lot with stakeholders of all sorts, including socially responsible investors, that now account for over ten trillion dollars of investible assets, NGOs, analysts, competitors, et cetera. We do a lot of outbound reporting, so again, there’s a lot of expectation around transparency and actually reporting of all sorts.

We work a lot internally with our sales organizations, with the various business units, on, again, weaving that into their strategic planning and their customer engagement, and then a lot of just governance, whether it’s setting policy – for example, we have formal policies on things like use of chemicals.

We have a climate policy. For example, we don’t have a specific policy on water, because actually, we’re not a very water intensive company, but a lot of our stakeholders are saying, “You need to have a point of view. You need to have a position,” so we’re in the process of looking at that, to say, “Do we have a policy on water?”

We often get asked for things, like do we have an animal rights or animal welfare policy? Yeah, I know. [Laughter] We got caught once sponsoring–one of our regional teams sponsored the Iditarod race in Alaska right at the time when PETA decided to showcase what they thought was wrong with that event, in terms of using animals for entertainment and all of that, and they actually came to Dell, saying, “You support animal cruelty.” We’re like, “Well, we just gave them some money just to support this race.” Again, this was not a central initiative, it was just a local initiative.

A lot of these things, again, when you work with stakeholders, you kinda have your finger on the pulse of what are all your constituencies out there? We sometimes get hit up by people who think we should take a much more active role in response to childhood obesity, because just like it used to be the TV and then gaming consoles, they’re saying computers are the reason kids don’t go out and play anymore. We say there’s lots of things that probably contribute to that, and it’s just you have to pick your battles.

You have to know, “Where can we do something different to make it better?” In this case, there’s not something we would really do different about it. We care, but again, you have to look at what’s material to your business, otherwise, everything matters. We care about schools, about dogs, about all kinds of things, but we really have to say, “Where are we gonna put our resources and why?” That’s a lot of what our team does here.

In terms of what we look at, I mentioned some of the trends earlier. I think challenges, in terms of how does sustainability thrive inside an organization, again, these are kinda Dell specific, but I spend a lot of my time talking to peers at a bunch of other companies, whether they’re in hospitality, in food and beverage, in energy, in textile, et cetera, and I find these are very common to everybody. I think the regulatory dysfunction emphasizing compliance over innovation. There’s so many things you have to do just for the sake of doing it. You end up saying, “Okay, let’s just do the thing,” as opposed to really focusing on, “What should be do?” because it takes a certain amount of effort just to meet that.

A lot of what we call survey fatigue; again, all of these inquiries, these questionnaires, these things that come at us from all sides, just make it so that it’s just becoming an exercise of, “We’ll just respond to whatever question comes,” as opposed to, again, guiding a conversation. These are challenges to just not always be in reactive mode, but rather trying to guide the conversation.

As always in business, lots of priorities. Some it’s just a number of them. In some cases, they are conflicting and we have some conversation sometimes with the people who make our Alienware products. We sell kind of a very high-end gaming computing product. It’s called Alienware brand. They’re all about, “How much power can I pack into this thing?” as opposed to, “How much can I make it sustainable?” Sometimes, you just have to say, “How can you deliver great performance, great gaming experience, and still find a way to make it more energy efficient?”

Budgets and resources always are a challenge. Something, unstable ROI; it’s hard, the kinds of things we look at in sustainability are multi-year usually. Corporations aren’t always great at focusing on the multi-year deliverables. There’s things like recently I heard – we haven’t actually personally experienced this, but at a meeting I was at last week, a couple of companies said they had to halt onsite renewable power generation because the business case no longer made sense, because of the plummeting cost of natural gas.

They said, “I can’t compete with the cost of that power and make a case for investing in either onsite wind, onsite solar, those kinds of things. I think those are things we need to figure out, either by building a better business case that incorporates not just the hard dollars, but some of those softer benefits around brand, around reputation, around employee engagement. Those are some of the challenges.

In terms of opportunities, obviously, we’re seeing it a lot. Customers care and they want us to be good and they want us to be better, so that’s a great pull. When we go into parts of the organization, we clearly have that tool to say, “You may not care; your customer cares.” Investors, same thing; more and more are hitting on the CFOs door and asking for more disclosure, more transparency, and then more performance, and obviously, that gets attention.

It’s more and more a great attribute of the brand, and not just for the outside world, but actually employees really care. What you find is companies that have a great reputation or great programs around corporate responsibility can get better talent for less money. You go ask somebody at BP what they had to pay to hire people, like maybe a year ago, because for equal pay, will you go work for BP versus Google? [Laughter]

This stuff is real, and the way your employees are engaged and the way they’re motivated to do whatever it is that they do, most of your employees, and most of our employees certainly, don’t work in sustainability, but all of our employees love what we do in the realm of sustainability, and it’s a motivator, it’s a retention driver. Then they translate it back to their customers, so it’s a great opportunity to leverage.

We also, especially in our industry, the fact is, we think we’re good, but we’re actually in a space where we have some really good competitors. IBM is doing some really good things with their Smarter Planet initiatives. HP is doing all kinds of interesting things, but also, we’re up against some non-traditional players, especially now, with the advent of cloud computing. We’re not just competing against people who sell computers, we compete against people who sell computing, and so you have the likes of Google; Amazon, actually, is one of the largest cloud providers now in the world; different clientele, but they’re clearly eying the corporate space also; AT&T; Xerox.

Xerox, they’ve always called themselves the document company, right? Now they’re saying, “Well, the document used to be this thing where you could make copies, but now it’s all about where you’re gonna store your documents. We’re gonna give you anywhere, anytime access to your documents,” and that’s all about cloud-based storage, which is a big business for us also.

This is really challenging us to stay on our toes and not fall behind, cause, frankly, as much as we were able to take a lead a few years ago, we’re in a very competitive space now. I’d say if you’re in the petroleum business and you decide to be green, you won’t have as much competition [laughter] in that part of the brand building as you would in other businesses.

Then I think this idea that executives are again being asked by large customers, being asked by investors, being asked at employee town halls, and frankly seeing it in the press. KPMG released a report the other day saying, “These are among some of the top trends for CEOs.” Accenture did a similar report.

This is great, cause frankly, we’re seeing a lot of internal pull from the top down, saying, “Wait, what are we doing on this? What are we doing on this? What are we doing on this?” It’s really creating an air of permission for everybody else inside the company to look at how they’re doing, what they’re doing, and find better ways to do it.

Okay, a couple more slides and then we’ll open it up for discussion. This is a slide that actually Claire and I use in our class, just to give a sense of–I’ve talked a lot about corporate just now, but just a short inventory. This is not exhaustive, by any means, of where else do sustainability jobs live?  In fact, in my job I interface with actually pretty much all of these people. That’s how I kinda came up with this list, so certainly–inside corporate, things like strategy, operations, environmental health and safety, environmental affairs, energy management.

Energy manager is a job. We have a bunch of them, and that’s only get more. People in procurement, engineering, design services, communications. We don’t have any dedicated HR folks for sustainability, but that may come. In the broader corporate social responsibility space in the philanthropy, again HR there, yes, especially on the diversity and inclusion side. Environmental protection and social justice and equity are more and more becoming tied, and corporations are starting to understand that as well. Community development; in the socially responsible investing side. I mean, you have investment managers, but you also have public affairs people. You have all kinds of jobs.

Actually, one of my counterparts locally, Suzanne Fallender, who does my job at Intel, started her career in the SRI side of things. A lot of boutique research companies that do a lot of research, actually, mostly to sell it to these guys, but also, for example, Maplecroft global risk management research, where they sell it to companies like us to say, “Where are your supply chain risks? What are the things you need to be aware of?” et cetera.

Lots of dedicated media, agency, even event planning. All kinds of stakeholders that are kind of your conscience and that you work with, like Business for Social Responsibility or Ceres. Certainly, Tons of consulting, both the large consultants are certainly getting into this space. The likes of Accenture and others, have now sustainability practices that a lot of dedicated ones, like the Green Orders and others.

The same in accounting. The fact is, at the end of the day, sustainability has a lot to do with risk management, with auditing, with fiduciary responsibility to making sure that you stay in business, and so all of the big accounting firms actually have now pretty robust sustainability practices for assurance, for risk mitigation, all of that.

Obviously, there’s all kinds of things happening at the policy and regulating level, both at the global level, national, state, city, county. Our own Colin Tetreault from ASU, is now Senior Policy Advisor to Mayor Stanton on sustainability issues. Good for him. Other types of nonprofits, like the Global Reporting Initiative, Carbon Disclosure Project, Sustainability Consortium; all these organizations employ dozens or hundreds of people, and certainly in academia.

Non-sustainability jobs in companies whose business is sustainable by nature; like Dixon Golf, just down the street, make the most sustainable golf ball in the world. Everybody in that business is all about, “How do you sell sustainability? How do you do sustainability?” U-Change, another company, just not far from ASU, looking at how do you actually monetize the e-waste streams in more intelligent ways. All kinds of groups, like the standards organizations.

Just to give a flavor for when we talk about careers in sustainability; one, there’s lots of them. No matter what your skillsets, your experience, there’s plenty of space to go, and I’m seeing a lot of crosspollination. Actually, recently, we’ve hired people who came from this area, this area, this area, this area. There’s a lot of crosspollination, so these are also good building blocks from a career perspective.

Just to give you a sense of, again, Dell is among many, and I picked this up from–actually, Claire and I were at the Net Impact Conference in November? October?

Sullivan: October.

Sarda: October–in Portland. Net Impact is an organization mostly aimed at graduate students, and it started with a big MBA focus, but less and less so, whose objective, mission is to try and go work in some kind of social or environmental type of job. The conference had about 2,600 attendees, chapters from all of the world. It had 88 sponsors, 385 speakers.

Now you look at the companies represented here. These were all companies that put money into that event that brought–I mean, there was an entire ballroom full of these booths where these companies were there. “This is what we’re doing. Maybe you wanna come work for us.” I mean, these are companies investing money in trying to sell themselves to people who want to do careers in sustainability.

Again, there were 88 sponsors. That’s not the full list, but you can see, there’s very few industries that are not represented here, from financial services, to chemicals, coffee, retail and the like. The size of the logo is just depending on how much money they gave, so we gave more money than these guys, but they all gave money. They all came, so I think this gives you a sense of actually this is perceived as a tool of recruitment. It’s perceived as a tool of retention, and brand building, and ultimately where you can potentially get really good talent.

All right, last slide; pot starters on career success. This is also something we use in class. There’s these things, this relationship between what you love, what you are good at, and what pays well, right? Ideally, you’re somewhere in the middle. Doing something you love that you suck at, it’s just a dream, right? Doing something you love that you’re good at but doesn’t pay well; well, you’re happy but poor. Then if you do something that pays well and that you’re good at, but doesn’t necessarily align with what you love, then you’re rich but bored.

As you think of these dimensions, it’s okay not to be here, as long as you’re kind of aware. For example, some people can be happy here, if they’re like, “My job isn’t where I find my satisfaction.” Maybe they invest a lot of their time in volunteering or community involvement or something, or these people gamble a lot or try to trade the stock market or something. The idea, a lot of what Claire and I kind of cover in our class, is one, there’s an attitude and mindset that matters.

I always say, and when I talk to peers of mine, they tend to agree; we all call it something different, but when I hire, I hire for attitude first, ability second, and then for experience, cause for the last 16 years or so, I’ve been in jobs where I’m kind of on the leading edge of something different, disruptive. Most of my career has been in kind of the strategic side of ecommerce adoption in large businesses, at Charles Schwab and at Dell, so this idea that my job was always about kind of breaking the status quo and always trying to do something new.

What I’ve done before is only mildly interesting. It’s what I’m gonna do next that matters more, and the best indicator of how well I’m going to do that is the attitude I bring to my work and the ability to learn, the ability to adapt, the ability to lead, the ability to collaborate, to be inclusive, et cetera.

These are traits that we really try to train our students, and certainly the people I coach in my professional setting, of how do you do that? How do you convey these abilities? How do you convey that attitude so that even if you come into a conversation where the experience isn’t necessarily what you’ve done, you can demonstrate; it’s like, “Whenever I’ve been hit with something new, I can adapt quickly and do it well.”

Something we say again, I run into a lot of people on campus who say, “But I’m not really sure what I wanna do.” I say, “That’s okay. I don’t really know what I wanna do either,” but what you want is you don’t want to let that stop you from having a plan. You can always have a plan for what is it that you’re gonna do next, and maybe the next few things, even if you’re not exactly sure of what that destination is, right?

In fact, I say, “Here, drive from a vision, but execute to a plan, cause what matters in the workplace, certainly in corporations, but frankly anywhere, when you talk about career success or people who can drive results, you have to be able to deliver results, whatever those results are. They’re not necessarily financial, but when you’re employed by somebody, there’s that value proposition of they’re gonna give you money, a salary, benefits, whatever, in exchange for some kind of value that they’re gonna get in return, and they’re always gonna consider, “Are you gonna give me that value better than somebody else who might be applying for the same role?” You have to be thinking in terms of, “What is the value I bring to that conversation?”

Again, know your value proposition. One way I describe it is, your value proposition is if you spend 20 or 30 minutes with an interviewer or somebody that you’re networking with, what are the key things that you want them to remember about you when you walk away? What are the key things you want them to say about you when they talk about you to somebody else? That’s your value proposition. That’s what you want to be known for, but then you have to be able to convey it. You have to have a good pitch. You have to know how to describe what you’re good at and what value you bring to somebody in a very compressed amount of time.

The fact is, whether it’s a resume, it’s a very small piece of real estate to convey a lot of information, whether it’s your LinkedIn profile, whether it’s just a networking event, even an interview. Most interviews now, screening interviews are sometimes less than 30 minutes. That’s not a whole lot of time, if it takes you five minutes to even say where you’re from. Trust me, I’ve been there. It’s like, “Whoa, I don’t need to know how many siblings you have. It’s okay.”

Have a sense of what success means to you. Again, know kind of where you fall, what really motivates you. If this is really the space you wanna operate in, understand that you may fall somewhere in that spectrum. If financial security is really important to you, again, there’s nothing wrong about that. Understanding that this is more the sphere and that you may not necessarily go this way or go this way.

Some people who are very, very talented artists, for example, but who have a very strong sense of financial security, it’s like, can you really find something that you’re really good at that’s gonna pay really well? If you know kind of what success means to you, you can have that inner peace about, “I know what I’m giving up and I’m okay with it.”

The more you have that sense of balance inside of you, both in terms of, “What am I good at? How do I communicate it? What are my key values, and ultimately, what are my non-negotiables and what are the things that I’m willing to let go of?”–it really starts coming across in every conversation you have, and then that’s what really translates into value that others perceive.

The last piece I’ll say here, is develop a lifelong network and never stop. Networking is not something you do when you’re looking for a job. Networking is something you do all the time, forever, and it’s awesome. Once you kind of just accept it for what it is, it’s just meeting new people, learning new things, and making new friends. That’s really what it is, and it’s critical inside a job.

I mean, I could not do anything in my job without the network that I’ve built inside of Dell; the network that I’ve built outside of Dell. It’s constant. It’s something that’s living. You’re always doing it, and again, I think that’s something we stress highly and every guest speaker we ever bring into class says, “Network, network, network.”

 Again, it’s not the kind of thing where you go have a glass of wine down at the thing and say, “Oh, so where are you from?” or whatever. It’s this idea again of who’s out there that you either admire, who does something that you’re interested in and you wanna learn more about, who does something inside an organization that you think will be valuable to you, or where you can actually bring value to them, cause hopefully, there’s mutual value. That’s the strongest network, is if it goes both ways.

Then things like ambiguity is a constant; change is a constant. Just be okay with that. You don’t have to like it, just understand that that’s the reality of certainly our space. I was looking at this thing here. Somebody did a research project that high and very high levels of complexity, [laughter] increased by–or 79 percent. People are saying those are going to increase.

Complexity guides ambiguity, organizational complexity, product complexity, economic complexity, lots of things. Again, it’s there. It’s okay. You can still be successful and effective dealing with ambiguity, cause again, you have to deliver results. You can’t let lack of complete information, you can’t let organization morass, you can’t let lack of resources be a barrier.

You have to find a way, cause if you’re that person who says, “Whatever it is that’s at my disposal, I’m gonna make use of it and deliver against it,” that’s what makes you valuable. That’s what makes you an asset. That’s what gives you both job security, job upward mobility, it gives you frankly network value, because you become that person who knows how to get things done, and people frankly want that.

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The above transcript provided by Landmark Associates.