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Why integrating sustainability is everybody’s business
In this episode of the Sustainability Matters podcast, host Bruno Sarda explores the transformative value of embedding sustainability into every role throughout the organization.
The relationship between business and sustainability is evolving. As awareness of its importance – and value – grows, so does the recognition that responsibility for addressing the subject is not confined to specific sustainability roles. Indeed, growing opinion is that every job within an organization can and should be considered a sustainability job.
In this episode, EY Americas Climate Change and Sustainability Services Leader Bruno Sarda sits down with Pia Heidenmark Cook, a former Chief Sustainability Officer at IKEA and now senior board member, speaker and sustainability advisor, and Lisen Wiren, Programme Manager at IKEA Social Entrepreneurship, to discuss the very idea that every professional within any business can make an impact.
Pia and Lisen have just published a book Embedding Sustainability - How to Drive Organizational Transformation, based on decades of their experience. Listen to this insightful conversation where two seasoned sustainability professionals talk about the importance of threading sustainability into the basis of every organization, as well as on how typically small corporate sustainability departments can make a big difference.
Key takeaways:
Sustainability can, and should, be integrated into roles across the entire organization.
Embedding sustainability into every role can help companies at different levels of maturity find a path, drive transformation and build resilience.
For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.
Pia Heidenmark Cook
Change management is difficult. So, a lot of people are asking me about, not so much about what is it, but how to make it happen? Because it is a marathon, not a sprint.
Lisen Wiren
So, instead of working 80 hours a week, I switched to spending 80% of my time on integration.
And through that engagement and integration work, we had suddenly an organization of 5,000 coworkers wanting to drive sustainability from within their functions. Everyone has a role to play.
Bruno Sarda
Hello and welcome to the EY Sustainability Matters podcast, our regular look at ESG and sustainability topics and how they impact businesses around the globe. I'm Bruno Sarda, EY Americas Climate Change and Sustainability Services Leader and your host for this series.
In our interconnected world, where the economy, society and the environment are deeply intertwined, we can see that sustainability is no longer confined to just specific roles. Every professional can make an impact — from accountants and product designers who integrate sustainability into their decisions, to sales and marketing professionals who communicate the value of sustainable business models. Sustainability is truly becoming everyone's business. And so, today, we're thrilled to discuss the idea that every job can, and in fact, should be a sustainability job.
This is the main emphasis of a new book — Embedding Sustainability and How to Drive Organizational Transformation — written by two seasoned sustainability professionals, Pia Heidenmark Cook and Lisen Wiren. Pia is a former chief sustainability officer at IKEA and now senior board member, sustainability advisor, author and keynote speaker. And Lisen has been at IKEA for over a decade, where she's contributed to the long-standing commitment to building a successful sustainability brand for the large Swedish consumer company.
So together, Pia and Lisen will share practical insights on how professionals across the board, like HR specialists, finance teams, marketing experts, just to name a few, can incorporate sustainability into their existing roles without needing to change jobs. And they'll both draw from their personal experiences across years of sustainability work to reinforce the notion that every job can be about sustainability, and we'll discuss practical tools needed to engage the whole organization in creating sustainable value.
Not least, we'll talk about the challenges of change management and self-leadership and the experience of our guests evolving a successful sustainability brand from just a single-person team. For me, this is a topic that's close to my heart and echoes my own experiences as a corporate sustainability leader, professor, advisor for also the last 15 years or so. So, whether you're a sustainability professional or just want to make an impact in whatever role you play in the economy, this should be a really insightful discussion for our listeners.
So, Pia and Lisen, welcome.
Cook
Thank you, Bruno. It's great to be here.
Wiren
Thank you so much.
Sarda
Maybe just a question to both of you to get us started, and maybe I'll start with you, Lisen. Share with us what initially drew you to this field of sustainability and what has kept you motivated and engaged in this space over time.
Wiren
Thank you for the question. Well, I've been in the field for about 20 years now, and I think, for me, it started, to a large extent, when I was traveling around the world and seeing inequalities and poverty firsthand. So, for example, people living on waste dumps in places like India, or in townships in South Africa, and as well understanding the global challenges of climate change and consumption, and understanding that the way we live is not sustainable.
But then also with a firm belief that we can change that. And through my masters program, I think, most of my classmates went into different NGOs or different UN organizations. And perhaps I was a bit of the black sheep that went into the private sector. But I think while we need organizations that are changing, from different perspective, I think we also need the private sector to change thinking about the power that the private sector can have through value chains, through purchasing, through production, consumption, and influencing. So, that was the reason why I went into this field. And since then, a lot of things have changed and developed. So, I'm very excited about that development and potential within the private sector.
Cook
And for me, a bit similar, but different. I have a business degree from the beginning, and this is back in the '90s, and we learned in economics about externalities. And that, together with quite a lot of issues when I grew up in terms of the Baltic Sea and seals and so on. So, it kind of felt like I'd seen it more on the environmental side maybe than on than the social side. I'd seen it in my kind of day-to-day in Sweden. And also, Chernobyl happened when I grew up. So, there was that kind of awareness.
And then when we talked about externalities at university, for me, and I had the environmental economics as one of my courses, it just became very difficult to kind of just go back to mainstream business and go out and just do the normal business stuff. And that's when I decided to get a degree in sustainability. And then, I continued at university as a PhD, too, to just learn more and work more with it. And then I've done that since I graduated, but always, as Lisen, always in the corporate sector because I do believe in entrepreneurship.
I believe that private sector companies are excellent at solving problems and kind of finding new ways. And it is a lot about finding new ways and finding new products, services that have a lower carbon footprint. So, for me, that was never a question that I would use my business degree, but have it more with the kind of triple bottom line perspective. And why I've kept and stayed working in it, it's because it's constantly evolving. So, the things I work on today are very different from what I worked on in the 1990s. I mean, still within the same framework, but we learned so much. And we are making progress — even though it's very slow, we are making progress.
So, it feels like it's never a dull moment. And it gives a lot of purpose — in terms of from a work perspective, it's something that gives me purpose.
Sarda
Great. Thank you both. Maybe, Pia, staying with you for a second. So, you led sustainability in a big global corporation and you just mentioned kind of from the start and how it advanced. How would you say that space and the role of business and that function within business evolved since you originally started out?
Cook
It's evolved a lot, and I think it's still evolving. And I don't think we've seen the end of how it will evolve. But I mean, when I started out, my first head of sustainability job was in 2001. And then it was very much a senior external advisor had told the management team that they needed to start this role and build up a team. I had no one in the team, so I worked through people, through business leaders, and built up an ambassadors program. So, I wouldn't say isolated because I really worked with all the departments, but very small. And there were limits to what you could achieve and very little understanding in the rest of the organization. And then moving on, 10 years later, I would say there were still a lot of engineers working with sustainability.
It was a lot around energy management, waste management, more the kind of hardwiring. And then on the people side or social side, it was mainly around HR: so, how you manage your own employees and how you treat your own employees in a good way. And then came the whole supply chain more and more. And then with time, came a broader understanding that it's not — even if the team is one person or 150 people, like I had toward the end at IKEA — it's still very small compared with the size and the footprint of the total organization. So, you need to work through the different departments. And that understanding came and also an understanding — I think two kinds of awarenesses came.
The level of conversation about sustainability in society today, I wouldn't say extremely deep, but at least awareness of sustainability and climate change, but also an understanding of value chain, supply chains, and that there are people somewhere that have been making these products, and sometimes not under great conditions. I feel that that awareness is there.
And then also people at work's awareness that it's not just sustainability department that does this. You need to really reflect through procurement, through product development, marketing, and others — how you contribute. So, there's been a much higher level of awareness. It's still difficult because it's still about changing existing business practices, but there is a much higher level of understanding today than 25 years ago.
Sarda
Yeah. That's great. So, I think we can move on to hear more about this book. So, the two of you went together, maybe, Lisen, starting with you. What would you say was that main idea behind that putting pen to paper of sorts? Who did you write it for?
Wiren
I would say there were two trigger points, and maybe that has led into two main messages of the book. And I would say the first one is very much to what you said in the introduction that everyone has a role to play when it comes to sustainability. And both Pia and I had been, for a longer time, approached by people who wanted to work with sustainability and who wanted to become a sustainability manager, for example. And our response was always to them to say yes, but where are you working now?
Try to discover how you can have an impact while working in finance or while working in this type of organization or sector. And with that sort of conviction, we began to interview around 30 people who are working in different functions and different sectors and so on, with very various types of professions. And, for example, we interviewed a woman called Kali Andersson and she founded something called The Climate Psychologist.
But she explained to us through this interview that when she got this a-ha moment around climate change, she felt that she had to reschool herself from being a psychologist to, for example, starting to study biology or something that was closer to nature. But while taking that pathway and while as well trying to do everything from an individual perspective, as a consumer, she stopped flying. She cycled 36km to work, she became vegan and so on and so forth, but starting to become a little bit hopeless as well when she continued seeing the curves going in the wrong direction.
So, then seeing, okay, as an individual, I am doing everything that I can, but it goes in the wrong direction. What do we need to do as a society? We cannot work solely as individuals. We need to come together, work together. We need to bring collective change. And then it dawned on her that who knows anything about collective or behavioral change? Well, psychologists know something about that.
And that was sort of a 360 realization that she had, understanding then that she could have an impact as a psychologist talking about behavioral change and so on. She founded Climate Psychologist together with two others, and now they are working directly with politicians and other decision-makers, trying to make a change from that perspective.
And that is just one of the examples from the interviews that we use to illustrate that, regardless of what type of function or type of organization you're in, you can have an impact. So, I would say that was one of the drivers. And if I may take one more example. Being a sustainability manager in the Netherlands, I experienced that coming in as a young person, being very ambitious and wanting to create change within the organization, I was running on a lot of different type of projects, high and low and very spread. So, it could be anything around waste management, to giving strategic input, to building a more sustainable store, to educating internal coworkers about sustainability.
But to a large extent, I was doing a lot of those things on my own. So, instead of working 80 hours a week, I switched to spending about 80% of my time on integration. So, working with different functions, engagements, working with awareness, competence development, having workshops with all the different functions for them to find ownership, to develop their role in the entire journey. And through that engagement and integration work, we had suddenly an organization of 5,000 coworkers wanting to drive sustainability from within their functions. And of course, that was a huge turning point and also gave a great result to the organization. So, I think those two examples — they were really catalyzing factors for driving the book and also main messages — that everyone has a role to play. And also showing how to do that within the organization, that all the functions can really contribute, and only then the big changes will happen.
Cook
And I can just add a third reason that we felt is that, and maybe especially also since I left my role and working with a lot of other companies. Change management is difficult. So, a lot of people are asking me about, not so much about what is it, what is it I need to do? There's much more guidelines, the structures and frameworks today than ever before. But how to make it happen? So, that's the main question I get is what were the challenges and how did you overcome them? And then Lisen and I started talking about how can we kind of share? And the book format is one way.
I also give a lot of speeches, and I have a lot of meetings and coach people, but how to kind of share so that people don't need to make the same mistakes that Lisen and I made, but can find faster ways of making it happen in the organization. And then maybe the fourth reason is also we actually dedicated a whole chapter to resilience and self-care, because we also feel like we meet a lot of people who are — it's going up and down. Energy levels are going up and down.
And how to find ways of keeping your energy levels because it is a marathon, and not a sprint. And that's also something we've experienced firsthand. So helping and hopefully giving, sharing our examples and our learnings and journeys helps others to kind of stay for the long run.
Sarda
Yeah, for sure. I think that's a really important part of the role is to look at the long term, but manage the short term both organizationally and individually. So, maybe staying with you, Pia. In your experience, having done this work for a long time, talked and worked with a lot of people maybe, what was some of the most surprising insight that you think came out of this work and this idea of sustainability integrating and finding its way across an organization?
Cook
It still strikes me how it resonates with people. I was just meeting a customer experience team yesterday in one of the companies I work with, and it resonates and people have really good questions and want to do things, but it still is almost an a-ha moment when I start to share how they, in their day-to-day job, could actually contribute.
So, it still becomes a little bit “telling me what they are doing in the sustainability team because I am interested, I'm leaning in, I want to be part, I want to know, but I don't really see how it has to do with me.” I mean, you know that any transformation requires the whole organization. It's the digital transformation, absolutely, but also the sustainability transformation.
And there I feel maybe we were a bit spoiled, Lisen and I, working where we have been working, where it's very purpose-driven, vision-led. People are really leaning in, and it strikes me — it's not maybe so much through work writing the book, but more working with a lot of different geographies and different sectors, that there is still quite a big gap to people really seeing what their role is.
The finance community, not just investors and the investment community, but also the finance internally have stepped in a lot, especially with the reporting requirements. And there are even companies are now starting to talk about chief value officer and not just CFO. Procurement, I think, for a long time has worked with sustainability through the supply chain work. But then there're a lot of other functions where it's still relatively new. So, I think that maybe is a bit that surprised me.
Sarda
Yeah, thanks. And actually, going back maybe to this idea of the power of the individual. In the book, you both talk about this concept of self-leadership in the context of sustainability. Can you elaborate on that and let us know how you kind of help individuals see how they can take initiative and lead or at least support sustainability efforts within their own roles?
Wiren
Absolutely. And I think that Pia was onto it a bit before. But sustainability transformation, to a large extent, is about change management, and I think all change is difficult: one meets resistance. But sustainability in particular is challenging because of its nature, because of its severity, the existential threat against the planet and humanity's wellbeing. But also it's difficult because leaders within sustainability might meet resistance because of lack of knowledge. It could be short-term thinking, other priorities. So, that's why we found it important to dedicate an entire chapter about this in the book.
And I think we have gotten some good feedback on that, too, that it is important. Many leaders are feeling overwhelmed because they feel a huge responsibility to solve all of these challenges on their own and to do it with urgency as well. So, the other thing is that we want to mention that one can work with this topic with different levels, right? So, one thing is to do it as an employee or to do it through an organization. And that's what the book is mainly focusing on. But of course, as an individual, you can also have an impact as, for example, a voter or as a consumer or as an owner. So, there are different roles one can have an impact as an individual, and that's important to remember as well. When it's a bit more heavy in one area, one can try to still move things forward within another area, so that can help from a sort of resilience perspective.
Cook
And another learning is even if it's hard, and I think that, like Lisen said, there's always this knowledge and awareness when you work in the space that nothing is being done at the scale and at the speed that is really needed, and that creates huge burden and frustration. But still to remember that there is progress. And then I'm speaking to someone last week and saying good progress is still not enough. And that is the kind of problem we're sitting with, but still remember that there is progress.
And I often work with my team, and especially when I had younger people in my team that came into the workforce and they wanted to change everything. And they got really frustrated very quickly when things were not going fast enough. But then, sometimes, just look back a year or five years to remember what were the topics we were working on then, what were the achievements then, and then look what we are actually achieving today. So, there is progress. So, celebrating successes and remembering that progress is being made. Even though, unfortunately, it's a bit too slow and not as much as we need, but progress is being made.
Sarda
Yeah, for sure. You know, in the book, you stress this idea that I firmly support that every job not only can be a sustainability job, but in fact, in many ways, is a sustainability job because the whole of the organization, that every part needs to ultimately do their part. So, you touched briefly on the role of corporate finance and organization that we, of course, at EY tend to spend a lot of time working with. But these roles may be traditionally not seen as core to sustainability, like finance, maybe like human resources. Do you have some examples of how you've seen them either making an impact or needing to make an impact?
Cook
Definitely, on many levels. If I take a retailer where you have the store and then you have the country level, you have the global level. If you take a store level, like a super easy example maybe is in logistics, where you unpack all the goods and you drive around 40 trucks, then it's quite easy to feel like what has the company's sustainability vision and plan to do with me? But then just sometimes sitting down and talking it through and explaining that the way you drive that truck, you will either use a lot of fuel or much, much less, or can we do a project so we have lithium battery forklift trucks instead of the traditional diesel one? You know, from that kind of everyday job that is happening every day through all sorts in the whole world, there is something you can really do.
And then in terms of product design, working with tools to create circular products or to create products with sustainable materials, reflecting and working together with suppliers on how do you design the product so that you waste as little as possible through the value chain or through the production process. Procurement — I mean, it's an obvious one in terms of code of conduct and really putting demands, but not only putting demands, but collaborating with suppliers and see them as partners on how can we together create the change that is needed and not just put demands, but really work together? Commercial organization, hugely important in terms of how do you display products?
How do you also bring market knowledge into the sustainability team, what works, what doesn't work in terms of which products, which messages work for customers? The comms team — how do you transparently and openly talk about both your successes, but also what's difficult and how do you find ways? And I think one key learning from comms and marketing is how do you use the tone of voice that you do for all your other communication, also for sustainability communication. So, you don't have a fun and upbeat tone of voice for everything else, and then comes sustainability and it becomes deep and heavy and boring. So, these are so many ways. And I think that, for me, one of my key learnings was it's just impossible to build a sustainability team with all those capabilities.
So, you need to work with others. And I was often saying, the one who knows best how to build sustainable stores is real estate because they build stores all the time. And then with some support on finding the frames, the tools, the criteria of what is a sustainable store, they can do it. So, it's really much more about how do you engage in that dialogue and giving the tools to the organization. And I often felt, not always, but I often felt that they wanted to do it. It was more like, how am I going to do it? Because I have sometimes conflicting KPIs and then it's important to bring those up to the front and discuss them and really see what are the real barriers? Why are we not making progress? And sometimes, those big barriers are really perceptions rather than real barriers.
Sarda
Yeah, yeah. And Lisen, I really liked how you said that earlier. You went from spending 80 hours a week trying to make the difference on your own to spending 80% of your time trying to really get others to leverage their power in the organization. What would you want to add to that in terms of how you saw that activation play out?
Wiren
We believe very much that the people within the organization that are working with it, they will have the answers themselves. What a sustainability leader or business leader needs to do is to create the right preconditions. For example, knowledge, clarity on strategy, governance, structure, frameworks, incentive schemes. They basically need to make it easy for coworkers and employees to make the right choices. And I think that's sometimes where the challenges sit that, for example, what Pia said, there may be conflicting goal settings, for example, and those things are very much up to the management to change and facilitate.
But believing in that when the prerequisites are there, the coworkers and the people who are the specialists, they will find the answers.
Sarda
Yeah. I'm reminded, as you both talk, years ago, there was another book written by Andrew Savitz called “Talent, Transformation and the Triple Bottom Line,” which was all about this idea, going back to this idea of change management, transformation. And that at the end of the day, any change agenda, you know, requires maybe new training, new performance management systems, new incentives and KPIs and measures and all the kinds of things that, for example, HR organizations are really important at, and how to enlist them in the role of sustainability. So, those are great examples. So, maybe building on this idea then, as sustainability continues to be democratized, distributed, integrated, whatever word we want to use, what do you think then is the role of the future CSO as it continues to transform and the organization plays a more kind of collective action role?
Cook
I think one key role is to hold it together because as much as everyone starts to work on it, it’s easy that just like with any topic or any project in a company, that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. So, holding it together so that there’s that collective effort toward the goal. Staying put at the vision or the North Star, redefining the North Star because the area is evolving very quickly. So, at least today, and maybe not in 10, 15, 20 years, but at least today and for the next few years at least, I think there is a need for a function that keeps at the top or at the breadth of expertise, if that’s human rights or if it’s climate, nature, biodiversity, sustainability reporting, bt you need that expertise to support the organizations. I think those are key roles. And then, of course, the role is changing much more from an expert to someone who is a conductor that holds things together, creates a vision and gets people with them. So, less of an expert, for the more of a conductor, I would say.
Wiren
And as well contributing to building a culture that supports sustainability is also very critical. And that can be both in the sort of the soft and the more structural elements — thinking about what words are used, what kind of questions are we asking and so on. So, contributing to the culture, I think, is also one part that the sustainability leader can do. And continuing challenging the goal settings so that it doesn’t stagnate somehow. And that’s, of course, related to the bringing in new knowledge and so on, but continuing challenging the business.
Cook
Yeah, keep stretching the business. Absolutely.
Sarda
Yeah. I love these insights. So, in terms of actual change management, right? What does that actual transition look like? How should businesses approach this idea of embedding sustainability more, if not formally, at least more effectively into our roles? And what can they do or what should they do to encourage employees to take that personal accountability and translate that into, kind of, their own job descriptions?
Wiren
So, I think maybe building on that Netherlands experience, we suggest to use really a bottom-up and a top-down approach. And with bottom-up, in this case, we’re talking about the engagement, the awareness, the competence development. And here, for example, sustainability leaders or business leaders can stimulate forming, for example, green groups or social ambassadors, where it’s more self-organized and stimulate different type of projects and competitions to sort of create a movement.
That’s great, but it’s not enough. And that we take from own learnings that we see that some of these passionate people who are involved in this, when they move position, for example, or leave their organization, then everything can fall at once. So, it needs to be embedded in the structure as well. And here we’re talking more about governance structure, integrating in role descriptions, decision-making forums, decision processes, budget processes, reporting systems, incentive schemes, bonus systems, compliance, contracting and so on and so forth. So, sustainability should just be a natural part of the entire business system and making that to function. So, only then it will last over time. So, it should be both sides.
Cook
Yeah. I think Iit’s a key point that we try to bring up through the book several times that it is about the hardwiring as much as it is about the softwiring. And it’s not either-or. It’s both. And in terms of maybe one of our learnings is that maybe you don’t start, like, if you’re starting day one in an organization that haven’t done a lot on sustainability, and you start by integrating sustainability tasks and KPIs in every job description, that might be difficult if there’s very little awareness. So, there is that work of building some awareness. I would also say success breeds success. So, starting with sustainability projects — so, you start to see that this is actually feasible, this is something I want to be part of. I want to do this.
This is actually beneficial for me in my department and my job. And then get it into the job descriptions, and then keep evolving it that way. I think, at least —from our learning, it’s not easy to kind of start with putting it in the job description, but it’s important to put it there because a lot of companies work with incentive schemes and bonuses and KPIs, which is really important. So, I’m not saying it’s not important, but to really get into the job description that this is actually not on a higher level, like contribute to the vision of the company or contribute to sustainability goals, but really breaking it down into the tasks of that specific person, what are you going to do in your day-to-day job to contribute to sustainability? Because then it becomes tangible.
Wiren
And maybe if I may add one more thing then on the engagement journey. Of course, as a business, it’s important to cover the basics, right? To do the reporting, to cover legal requirements and so on. But to be able to create the buzz and the movement within the organization, it’s quite important to find something that excites people beyond that as well.
And that could be anything from design feature, to the products to campaign — something that is a bit more visible in the organization. So, trying to do both and work on several areas at the same time can be quite an important factor.
Sarda
Yeah. One more question before we wrap. I’m loving this conversation. But, you know, you titled the book “Embedding Sustainability and How to Drive Organizational Transformation.” And you talked, Pia, about the fact that you were fortunate to have a place to kind of build when you were at an organization where the support, the culture, the purpose was very supportive. Many organizations are nowhere near that yet and at very different stages of maturity or place in the economy. And so, how can embedding sustainability into every role help companies, maybe at different levels of maturity, still find a path and maybe find a drive for sustainable transformation and to build resilience over time, both in the individuals and the organization?
Cook
Well, it’s a very good question because even if there’re a lot of things in common, there are, of course, huge differences between geographies, sectors, individual companies and people. So, there is not one fits all. But I think one of my learnings is to be a successful sustainability manager, you need to understand the organization you work for and work with.
So, you need to understand what makes people tick, What are the drivers? Why have people chosen to work in that organization? So, for example, I get a lot of questions. You know, if you don’t have incentive schemes and bonus connected to sustainability, is that bad? And in an organization where a big driver is financial remuneration, to not have it connected to your bonus would probably be bad because then that’s how good results or good performance is rewarded. Other organizations might be driven by something else. So, it’s kind of really understanding that, I think that is a key part. And then working on the outside in, because there are different drivers for different organizations at different points in time.
So, you know, how are you mapping the risks? How are you kind of presenting the risks to the management team? What are the opportunities? But that often comes a bit later because people are more focused on the risks, or the costs, reductions possible. A lot of people talk about cost increases, but wasting resources is costly, so being smart with resources is actually where sustainability and then finance goes hand in hand.
What are the investors requiring of you? Doing scenario planning and doing the kind of outside in what’s happening to your sector, what are potential threats? So, a traditional strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats (SWOT) analysis is really, really helpful. So, I think there're a lot of tools, but building that kind of business case, and it might be more on the cost side or opportunity side, risks, growth, opportunities, different for different companies. But to build that, to create some sense of urgency, I find, has always been useful.
Sarda
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Pia and Lisen, for such an insightful conversation.
Wiren
Thank you so much for letting us join.
Sarda
You know, I think you touched on so many important topics. I think both the power that we have as individuals and our personal life maybe what we choose to eat, how we choose to travel to work, or where we shop, but also the power we have as individuals in our work lives and that we bring both our skills, our competence, but also our passions and values to our work, no matter what we do. And I'm reminded of this quote, I actually I've heard it from multiple people, but this idea of to change everything, we need everyone. And this belief that we need to enlist all parts of an organization to advance a sustainable transformation agenda.
Also really liked this idea that as much as we can feel the sense of urgency, and even crisis in some cases, that this is in fact more of a marathon than a sprint, and that we need to look at it that way and make sure we care for ourselves along the way because it can be exhausting to run a marathon if we try to make it just a series of sprints, right? And of course, for us at EY, we talk a lot about this strategic umbrella that we call All in, you know, this idea of we all need to be in together. So, again, thank you so much for sharing these insights. As I said at the beginning of the episode, this is the Sustainability Matters podcast. You can find all past episodes of the show on ey.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed this episode of Sustainability Matters, we'd love for you to subscribe. Ratings, reviews and comments are also very welcome. And we invite you to listen to previous episodes like the one we dedicated to sustainable innovations and the food chain, and how even a little step in this direction can yield encouraging results, or a more recent one talking about the exciting work of EY New Economy Research Unit. So, please visit ey.com where you'll find a wide range of related and interesting articles beyond podcasts that can help put these bigger topics in the context of your business priorities. Look forward to welcoming you on the next episode of Sustainability Matters. My name is Bruno Sarda. You can find me on LinkedIn and feel free to connect with me there.
In this episode of the Sustainability Matters podcast, speakers explore how the New Economy Unit at the EY organization can inspire businesses toward a regenerative economy.
In this episode of the Sustainability Matters podcast, the speakers explore how aligning your business with nature can create sustainable growth and profitability.
In this episode of the Sustainability Matters podcast, speakers discuss the global food system’s environmental impact, highlighting innovative technologies paving the way to more sustainable food choices.
In this episode of the Sustainability Matters podcast, speakers discuss Palau's climate resilience strategy, the significance of nature and the crucial role of global collaboration in aiding vulnerable island communities.
