In the last seven years of chaos, to what extent have your challenges changed, and how have you been able to leverage your position to influence the board to achieve outcomes that perhaps they hadn’ t imagined?
Noel, American Red Cross: I think it’ s easier for me than it is probably for my colleagues, because we are simply seeing it firsthand, it’ s right in front of our faces. We went from responding to a couple of billion-dollar disasters a year to responding to multiple billion-dollar disasters at the same time, constantly.
It’ s not an occasional blue-sky moment for us anymore; it’ s a constant in our disaster response. And so we had to reimagine what that looked like. We had to ensure we had the capacity to deliver the mission we needed to deliver. In doing that, it became obvious across every other part of our organisation that we needed to be more sustainable, that we needed to work with procurement and supply chain to ensure that our partners were on this journey with us.
Sirsij, Pfizer: Challenges will continue to evolve; there will be external forces that drive businesses, as well as internal drivers. I think our role as leaders is to make sure the sustainability agenda stays on the agenda.
That’ s the commitment, lean in, be proactive, bring data to the table and say, here is what is possible and here is why it is critical for the business. We also constantly evolve our focus, for example, if capital is not available, can we focus on other areas of investment that are not capital-intensive in order to deliver on our sustainability targets?
I think one of the biggest opportunities, and an area where we need to do a lot more, is supplier discovery. How do we engage the right suppliers, particularly beyond the US, that bring in cleaner energy and cleaner technology? That’ s a challenge we have today, but I’ m very proud of how we have evolved as a company over the last seven to eight years on the responsible business growth agenda, it’ s embedded in the business.
Lauren, United Airlines: I’ ve been at United for about seven years. When I joined, sustainability and environmental impact were somewhat in isolation from the business. procurementmag. com 93