Kevin Hagen is vice president of environment, social, and governance (ESG) strategy at Iron Mountain, a storage and information management services company with over $4.2 billion in revenues operating more than 1,450 facilities in over 60 countries as of 2020. Kevin advises global company leaders and business units to develop and implement sustainable business strategies that address a wide range of ESG issues, such as climate and energy footprint, human rights, social impacts, circular economy, ESG reporting, corporate philanthropy, and community engagement. Kevin leads the company’s strategy to achieve its commitment to The Climate Pledge to become net zero by 2040.
Before joining Iron Mountain in 2014, Kevin led sustainable business strategy at Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI). He also led engineering, marketing, and business development functions for companies in the renewable energy, aerospace, and military electronics markets.
Kevin serves on the board of the Clean Energy Buyers Association (CEBA) , formerly the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA), and other sustainability advisory councils and boards, such as the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts (Nareit), Sustainable Brands, and Net Impact. He is also an instructor in ESG reporting at the Harvard Extension School’s Sustainability Graduate Program.
Chrissa Pagitsas: Tell me, Kevin, about your career and the path that took you to leading ESG at Iron Mountain today.
Kevin Hagen: Leaving university with an undergraduate background in engineering, I joined an aerospace and defense contractor and had the opportunity to be involved in the design and development of custom components for civilian and military aircraft and systems. It was a great opportunity because I ended up straddling the conversation between customer needs and engineering design which included the process to develop, test, and launch new products.
That early professional experience taught me how to speak multiple business languages, the customer language, and our internal design and development language. Learning how to bridge organizational silos is an important competency in the pantheon of sustainability business skills and competencies. Later I ended up based in France and really had to learn two languages.
After working in the defense and aerospace field, I joined a small startup in the renewable energy space. It wasn’t much bigger than a two-bay garage operation at the time, but there was an amazing team of talent, best-in-class products, and lots of growth potential. It was very exciting because it was early in the growth of the renewable energy, solar, and wind industry, and the focus was on moving from just off-grid solutions to the grid-connected renewable energy industry. Trace Engineering was the first company in the United States to develop and deliver inverters and power electronics that could connect solar panels to the grid and power homes from both. It was a wonderful success in many ways, and we ended up going public.
However, I think focusing on a successful IPO [initial public offering] distracted us from our focus on making a difference with renewable energy. We started thinking about making money more than about making a difference and, in some ways, lost sight of the mission. I was as guilty as anyone else. As a result, the business didn’t go as well as it could have gone, and I left the company somewhat disillusioned.
In 2003, I started my own consulting firm in renewable energy, and shortly after, I attended a “go green” conference in Seattle. I saw a panel with Jim Hartzfeld and Gifford Pinchot III. Jim was the sustainable business leader and right-hand person to Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, Inc. He talked about Ray’s “spear in the chest moment” that changed his perspective on business and sustainability and moved Ray to set a new sustainable course for Interface and its carpet and flooring products. Ray’s story is captured in his book Confessions of a Radical Industrialist: Profits, People, Purpose—Doing Business by Respecting the Earth [by Ray C. Anderson and Robin White (St. Martin’s Press, 2009)]. Gifford spoke not only about the vision of sustainable business but the need to train people with business experience in sustainability so they could help change companies from the inside. He, along with his wife Libba and others, cofounded a new graduate school.
Hearing the Interface story and observing what was going on with the sustainable business movement, I found myself about three weeks later on a remote island in British Columbia sitting next to Gifford at the kick-off retreat for the first MBA in sustainable business at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute. Over two years, I learned a ton. And I had an amazing opportunity to be exposed to the people working at the intersection of business and sustainability, from MIT Professor John Ehrenfeld, who taught about industrial ecology, to Ray Anderson himself, who talked about his conversion to sustainable business, and to Amory Lovins, Janine Benyus, and Paul Hawken who focused on the imperative to address climate change, and others.
Coming out of the program, I understood the literature and the thinking around sustainability as a discipline, or so I thought. I soon had the amazing opportunity to join REI, the outdoor industry retailer and consumer co-op, working to implement the sustainable business vision of Sally Jewell, who had recently become CEO.
Around this time, in 2004 and 2005, a lot of businesses had begun to experiment with sustainability. There were well-known examples like Patagonia, Timberland, and Ben & Jerry’s . What was interesting about joining the co-op at the time was that it was already a billion-dollar business, and there were not many examples of companies at that scale working to incorporate sustainable business thinking. We started with the basics of metrics, data, transparency, and accountability. It led to a shift in thinking at the co-op.
In early 2013, Sally Jewell was nominated by President Obama to join his cabinet as the secretary of the interior. It was surreal to see my boss on TV at a Senate confirmation hearing. I thought that it was a wonderful mark of success for the co-op when the president introduced her as a leader in a new way of doing business. And we had the results to prove it. REI’s sales had doubled from $1 billion to just over $2 billion while its absolute energy consumption went down. We had installed the first solar panels on stores and were building one of the first net-zero energy distribution centers. On the social side, we started to find ways to use the power of the co-op to advance more inclusiveness in the outdoors and the outdoor industry, trying to make human-powered sports more welcoming to everyone. The co-op was using its power and influence in the industry to lead changes in human rights and environmental performance in the supply chain, helping to launch the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, among other industry efforts.
After over seven years at REI and a new CEO arriving, I felt that perhaps it was time for me to step aside, “get out of the way,” for the business to do more. So, I headed out to what I called a “ski-batical.” Then a marvelous person named Samantha Joseph found me. She was leading an effort at Iron Mountain to implement a sustainable business strategy and told me that they were mountaineers who shred, and I said, “These are my people.”
Pagitsas: [laughs] That’s pretty funny!
Hagen: Thanks for chuckling! The inside joke, of course, is that Iron Mountain employees call ourselves “mountaineers.” And “shred” wasn’t slang for skiing powder. It’s a reference to our secure paper destruction business. I’m not saying there was false advertising involved, but I was expecting a little more skiing!
But the opportunity was amazing. Samantha had done a tremendous job as a catalyst and as an entrepreneurial individual leading the effort to expand the idea of sustainable business at Iron Mountain. I had a wonderful interview with William Meaney, the CEO, during my hiring process. I’m paraphrasing the conversation, of course, but I heard him say that the company had a great ethos around environmental and social responsibility because the crux of Iron Mountain’s brand and business is trust. The core business was to manage and protect our customers’ most valuable and most important information and assets. They expected us to do the right thing, but what he was really getting at was that “doing the right thing” is not a business plan. We need to rethink business as usual. And that’s what brought me to Iron Mountain.
Pagitsas: What business services does Iron Mountain provide?
Hagen: For those who may not be familiar with Iron Mountain, we are a publicly traded real estate investment trust [REIT] serving primarily business-to-business customers with over 1,450 facilities in over sixty countries. We have about 25,000 employees worldwide and annual sales of about $4.2 billion. Historically we have been in the document and asset storage business. But we realized that as our customer’s information shifted from paper to digital, our business needed to change.
Today we still have a growing information storage business serving over ninety-five percent of the Fortune 1000, and we offer a full suite of data and information management and privacy solutions. From digitizing documents to becoming one of the top ten colocation data center providers in the world to becoming a leader in IT asset management, we’re helping our customers make the digital transformation.
Pagitsas: What did Iron Mountain’s sustainability strategy look like at the start, and where is it today?
Hagen: We’ve come a long way from our first sustainability report in 2014. In 2021, we announced twenty ambitious ESG goals. We have six long-term aspirational goals, such as signing The Climate Pledge, a commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. In addition, we made fourteen “on our way there” commitments, including even faster near-term greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions reductions and having women make up forty percent of our worldwide leadership team by 2025. Our goals cover all our most material ESG issues with commitments to employees, our communities, and our customers.
Going forward, a key part of our growth strategy is to incorporate sustainable business thinking—from the climate impact of data centers to the electronic waste issues associated with electronic assets to ethics and anticorruption to inclusion and diversity to human rights in the supply chain. The list of E, S and G issues we face is long. We know that our stakeholders expect corporations to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. We think that solving ESG challenges in our business is not only good for business. It opens the door to achieving even more as we help our customers and communities do the same.
Pagitsas: Given that Iron Mountain’s business is centered on thinking about the long-term storage of information and data, how does Iron Mountain think about the longer-term horizon of sustainability strategies and goals?
Hagen: As a publicly traded company, we can’t avoid measuring performance quarter-to-quarter, but we do have an inherent potential asset of being able to think a little more long-term than some organizations. Our customer relationships are measured in decades, and the average box of documents stays with us for fifteen years. As a result, I think we have something going for us. On the other hand, we don’t have many of the things that some folks associate with the typical sustainability conversation. We’re primarily a business-to-business company, not a business-to-consumer company. We’re a service-based business, not a product-based business. Just like when I was at REI, and people said, “Yes, that can be done at Patagonia, but it could never work here.” Now that it works at companies like REI, folks might say, “Well, it works at REI, but it could never work at Iron Mountain.”
Pagitsas: Why do you think people initially thought Iron Mountain couldn’t tackle sustainability as REI did?
Hagen: I suspect that folks who think in conventional trade-offs, either you do the right thing, or you do the business thing, look for ways to rationalize that point of view even when they see a business successfully delivering more of both. They might say, “Sure, it works at a consumer co-op, but it couldn’t work at a publicly traded company.”
It’s a discussion we’ve been having at Iron Mountain over the last five or six years as we’ve tackled environmental, social, and governance challenges in ways that delivered better outcomes. We found ourselves challenging the paradigm that you must make trade-offs. When we figured out how to make it cost less in the first place, it got easy to advertise our long-term thinking.
Pagitsas: Do you accept or reject the idea that you must make trade-offs when businesses integrate sustainability into their businesses?
Hagen: It’s conventional wisdom, which is that there are trade-offs with sustainability. It’s either do the “right thing,” or do the “wrong thing,” or in other words, the “business thing.” This trade-off mentality permeates popular thinking that “the green product always costs more,” or “it doesn’t work as well,” or both.
Conventional wisdom says that if you really want to make a difference in your career, you join the Peace Corps. You don’t join a corporation. You either do the right thing, or you do the business thing. It’s easy to fall into this Andrew Carnegie mentality of making tons of money and then giving it away when it’s over. It is an arguable approach given that in the early twentieth century, the Carnegie Foundation funded some fifty percent of the libraries in the United States. Yet, it’s probable that we’ve still not come to the end of the environmental damage that the Carnegie business did in the first place.
The opportunity for us sustainability leaders in those businesses who have been given the privilege to tackle sustainable business challenges is to hold on to the tension of not accepting trade-offs until you’ve figured out the right business solution. That’s our obligation. The reason we’re going to figure it out isn’t just because we’re Pollyanna. It is because we have developed tools, techniques, competencies, and hard business skills that give us better opportunities to solve problems in new, better ways not to accept the trade-off.
We’re more collaborative. We’re more innovative. We have better data. We understand the business challenges through the lens of social performance as a business challenge. I think that gives us more tools to solve the problem in different ways. It’s a symptom of the systems thinking approach. I appreciate a quote credited to President Dwight Eisenhower, “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough, I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”
When we figure out a better business solution, then we can do a whole lot of it. As I joke with our CFO, once we figure out how to make money at it, nobody stops us. On top of that, not only can we do a lot more of it, but other businesses can follow suit. Because now you don’t have to have religion. All you do is see the better solution, then you execute.
Pagitsas: What is an example of something that now costs less, and you rejected the trade-off?
Hagen: When we began thinking about the sustainability strategy for Iron Mountain, we had over 1,400 facilities in more than fifty countries to store information, data, and documents. We knew we paid over $40 million in utility bills, but we didn’t know how much electricity we actually purchased with that money. That’s not because we were dumb. It’s because, like many businesspeople, we just assumed that there wasn’t much you could do about it that would be a big enough difference to any individual building. But in order to make our first GHG emissions footprint, we needed to figure out how many kilowatt-hours we used. That data led us to some interesting findings. For example, our electricity use was our biggest source of GHG and that there was a lot more cost volatility than we knew about. We also learned there was a lot of variability in the energy use per building, even though we assumed it was consistent. It was eye-opening when we realized how much money we could save if the worst half of our buildings had the same energy use per square foot as the best half of our buildings. The data shined a bright light into some dark places in our knowledge.
Once we realized that we had lots of opportunities to reduce energy consumption, especially in lighting, the facilities management team did an amazing job of working with vendors to develop LED [light-emitting diode] fixtures that could go in easily and cost-effectively. We thought that we would be clever and set an impressive goal to halve our electricity consumption. It was going to be great.
While we were setting this goal to cut our energy consumption, another part of the business was recognizing that our documents management and storage industry was changing. Our company had to move from being a purely document-based company or, more specifically, a physical assets-based company to becoming a much more digitally oriented business with a focus on digital storage and data center colocation. While we were promising to cut energy consumption in half, the business strategy team was promising to grow our data center business—one of the most energy-intensive industries short of mining. We were never going “to LED” our way out of that.
Pagitsas: What was your takeaway from this experience?
Hagen: This is a critically important lesson for any sustainability leader—know what’s going on in your business. As soon as you become too centered on the one thing you thought you had, there’s somebody else working against you without even knowing it. Silos within a business tend to be a big disadvantage and create blind spots.
When we realized that energy efficiency alone wasn’t going to get us where we needed to go, we pivoted quickly to add a renewable energy strategy. If we were going to use a lot more electricity, it had better be from renewable sources because that’s the only way we were going to lower carbon emissions while increasing our electricity consumption. That posed a big challenge because we assumed renewable energy was more expensive. We couldn’t give our new emerging digital business a disadvantage in its cost of electricity, which wasn’t going to work. But we couldn’t build a new business with a fundamental ESG disadvantage either.
We could have bought a little green power at that point at a premium and called it good enough, but we didn’t. We held the higher bar, in my opinion. It took us at least eighteen months with plenty of starts and stops along the way to figure out a better solution. We eventually recognized that renewable energy had a huge advantage over fossil fuel generators because they have a great handle on their long-term costs. The costs of renewable energy systems are in the upfront capital to build them. There’s no recurring cost of fuel. Since there’s no fuel cost, renewable energy providers can more easily have a long-term contract for a fixed price whereas a fossil fuel provider has a hard time doing that. In addition, before the wind or solar asset is built, having a long-term contract in hand for the output makes financing the project a lot easier. So, both the buyer and the seller have an interest in crafting a long-term deal.
As we brought in the finance, tax, treasury, and legal teams, and all the other folks that were going to need to financially engineer this, we were also negotiating hard with third-party suppliers for renewable energy solutions. We ended up with answers that provided not only the better, more stable long-term cost solution but also a cheaper first cost.
We saved money in the short term and paid less for green power while we locked in long-term rates. Today, we’re now sourcing over eighty percent of our total electricity portfolio demand worldwide from renewable energy sources, and I don’t believe we’ve ever paid more for green power than for fossil fuel. In sum, we went from blind spots around electricity usage and false starts around making the wrong goal setting to making real innovation happen and figuring out how to use renewables to reduce our carbon footprint. While we’ve almost tripled our corporate electricity consumption, we have reduced our absolute carbon footprint by more than sixty percent since 2016 while growing the business.
Pagitsas: You pointed out a lesson for sustainability leaders—know what’s going on across the business. What other key lessons would you point out from this experience?
Hagen: Reject the trade-off, bring more people to the game, and get better data. In our situation, rejecting the trade-off meant hitting the pause button to say, “Wait, something’s wrong here. If it costs more to do the right thing, we can’t do much of it.” We first had to reject that convention. Next, we had to bring more people to the table, like the finance and tax teams, to bang out the right solution for the company with renewable energy.
Last, when you have better data, you make better decisions. When we started tackling energy efficiency, we had no idea how much electricity would be consumed with the new digital strategy. We knew from financial statements how much we paid in the utility line item, but we didn’t know we were rarely “on budget” for the year or the cost was going up every year. We didn’t know whether that was because we used more electricity or because we paid more for it. It just was seen as the cost of doing business. This meant that we didn’t have a good handle on our starting point with electricity. However, today, we know how much energy we are using, how much we are projected to use, and what we pay for it.
Pagitsas: Getting better data is an interesting point. My observation is that as you and the Iron Mountain team moved to integrate sustainability further into your services, you had to get data that you may not have looked for previously or even had. Will other companies face the same challenge?
Hagen: Absolutely. Yes, they will need to get new or better data. I think another fallacy in conventional thinking is to call environmental and social data non-financial metrics. For example, we used to think that employee diversity numbers and greenhouse gas emissions were somehow “non-financial.” While true in a conventional sense, today we think of ESG data as business data. It may seem like a stretch at first, but these days if we ask the organization to help collect some new ESG data points, I commit to peer leaders in the business that if after two years they don’t see the business value and use that data stream to inform their decisions, my team will stop collecting it.
Pagitsas: Why is bringing this data into business decisions challenging?
Hagen: I think that historically there has been resistance to bringing “emotional” or “heart” data, such as diversity or social issues, into business or “head” decisions. This resistance occurs because when we open the door to that discussion and start to look at some of that data, usually it’s bad news. Hiding in our blind spots are often negative environmental or social impacts that we would rather not know about. And once you start measuring, it always seems to get worse before it gets better. The natural human reaction is one of two places—denial or despair. Neither is a very helpful place. You have to get to hope.
The key opportunity for sustainability change agents like us is to use that data in a way that helps people see the opportunity to do something different and get better outcomes, better environmental, better social, better business outcomes. That’s the crux. We’ve experienced that over the last five or six years at Iron Mountain, where we went from blind spots to maybe some denial or despair and arrived at hope. Because we saw this different way to do it and now, we celebrate a better business outcome. That gave us incredible power to look across the business and see more opportunity. It was a formula, not a fluke. We can apply the formula to many more things across the business and get better outcomes.
The next stage has been to rethink even that. So far, we have challenged ourselves to reduce our negative impact, to have fewer safety incidences, to have a lower carbon footprint. There is a point at which it gets unsatisfying to make these incremental differences. In fact, I would argue that if you are in a place where you are thinking in terms of diminishing returns, you have already hit a plateau in your organization’s progress. The next set of thoughts for us is to go beyond that “do less bad” thinking. We have to find ways to use our business to “do more good.” This is about getting to solutions that create more positive benefits.
Pagitsas: We often celebrate successes but sometimes do not share lessons learned when things go wrong. Have you had an experience where a sustainability goal or activity went wrong or didn’t hit the mark?
Hagen: I have so many. [laughs] We missed our first carbon goal the first year that we put it together. It was by a couple of percentage points, so not by a lot, but we recognized that we didn’t have our hands around all the moving parts that were contributing to our climate footprint, from fleet operations and diesel consumption to our emerging data center business and our electricity consumption. And we had a lot of scope 3 emissions in our initial carbon number, which are tough to capture accurately. Because of the number of moving parts, we were unprepared. We didn’t have the metrics or the road maps and lacked an understanding of the levers that were contributing to the carbon footprint total.
Now, the great news of missing our first goal was that we had a goal set, and it gave us the reason to get the information we needed. I give our CEO and the leadership team great credit for absorbing the hit for missing our first goal and taking the attitude that we needed to learn from our process, not punish the guilty. We haven’t missed any published goals since.
Pagitsas: That is a great message for all CEOs and leadership teams when it comes to setting sustainability strategy and goals, especially for the first time. A “test and learn” approach is critical to the success of a sustainability strategy over the long term.
What happened next?
Hagen: We moved to the next stage: getting to metrics backed by a rigorous methodology and a process to govern and produce them repeatedly. We began to treat the sustainability metrics with the rigor that we treat business metrics. I think that was a huge turning point in how we do things.
Also, an important part of the next stage was when we said, “All right, we’re going to stop doing this with just our heart. We’re going to do it with our head and our heart.” That shift enabled us to engage with our employees to talk about how they can use their day job to make a difference in the things they care about. For example, having treasury people in an energy conversation allowed us access to more sophisticated finance and analytical tools, a new way of thinking of things, and new outcomes for the business. That has been a big key to our success.
Pagitsas: Looking externally, how do you engage with customers on sustainability?
Hagen: The number-one place we’ve seen the opportunity to “do more good” and grow the business is by engaging with our customers. The fact that we have solved ESG challenges in business-positive ways for our business gives us the opportunity to see ways we may be able to help our customers solve similar ESG challenges in their business. It gives us permission to have that conversation because we’re not just trying to sell them something, we’re a peer who’s solved the problem, and we’re trying to join with them to solve an even bigger problem together.
One example of this is in our data center business. Because of their energy consumption, data centers can be a big part of a company’s carbon footprint. Through the Clean Energy Buyers Association and its Future of Internet Power working group, we joined with our competitors, customers, key ESG data assurance folks, and leading NGOs [non-governmental organizations] like the World Resources Institute [WRI] and World Wildlife Fund [WWF] to develop an open-source protocol. This protocol allows data center operators to “pass through” the environmental attributes of our renewable energy contracts to our customers so they can claim legitimate scope 2 and 3 carbon reductions.
We are the first colocation operator to turn this protocol into a standard offer. Not only do our customers get our data center services, but they reduce their carbon footprint at the same time in a way they can report to CDP or RE100 or other bodies. We’ve actually gone through the whole arc, in my opinion, from energy blind spot, through this process of improving our operations, to now thinking of ways that we can join with our customers to do more good. What that has done is enabled enterprise customers of all sizes to not only benefit when they do business with us, but because we helped build it on an open protocol with World Resources Institute and others, they can ask for that same thing from every data center supplier and help change the industry.
Now, the whole industry can help make the grid greener for everyone because there is power in the marketplace trying to solve the problem. We’ve harnessed this great lever of enterprise to solve a big challenge for everyone, which is having a carbon-free grid because we thought through how to take what we’ve learned and apply it to what our customers need.
Pagitsas: How do you anticipate businesses will lead and operate in five years as a result of integrating ESG principles and sustainability principles into their core products and services?
Hagen: I believe the notion of “sustainable business thinking” is the equivalent of a disruptive technology to business. It’s changing everybody’s job and every business, and if it’s not changing your business, you’re not paying attention. The expectations for what business does and how we do it have moved dramatically.
ESG or sustainability is affecting every discipline in the business from marketing and finance to procurement, real estate, and product development. In marketing, you need to know what greenwashing is and how to authentically represent conversations. In finance, you need to know what green bonds are and what they mean. In procurement, you have to know what a life cycle assessment looks like and what’s the resilience of your supply chain. In real estate, you must know how to develop and manage green buildings because they’re better, have lower costs, and are more resilient. In product development, the ESG attributes of the product are going to become more and more important to solving customer pain points and developing better, faster, cheaper products.
Everything is being disrupted, and it’s not the Patagonia model. It’s the better, faster, cheaper model. Patagonia is arguably a sustainability-oriented business or brand, but for all their success as a brand, their products arguably are not functionally better. I’m not paying a premium for their coat because it’s warmer or more waterproof. I am paying a premium because I believe in their brand, and I believe in their company. I want them to do good things.
That’s not going to be enough in the next chapter of sustainable business progress in the conventional business-to-business space. Yes, we have to run a better operation with better environmental, social, and business outcomes, but that’s not going to be enough. We’re going to have to make better, faster, and cheaper products because they’re ESG-advantaged. Sure, we solve customers’ co-located data center needs at competitive pricing with great service. But because of our commitment to reduce our carbon footprint through renewable energy solutions, we realized that if we did it right, we can certify that and pass through the benefits to the customer, reducing their data center’s carbon footprint instead of increasing it. That’s just a better, faster, and cheaper product. I think that is the disruption that’s going on and what’s changing over the next few years. Different industries will feel it in different ways at different times, but this is what I see ahead for businesses.
Pagitsas: How do employees factor into this disruption and change?
Hagen: There are quite a few studies that say younger people want to work where they feel they make a difference. I do not think that is exclusive to young people. No one who has a choice is willingly going to leave their values in the parking lot when they come to work. That’s just not okay. It’s part of how this new way to think about business is blowing up “either/or thinking.” There was a time when if you wanted to make a difference in the world, you certainly didn’t think joining a corporation was the answer. But what if we can use our day jobs to make a living and a difference at the same time?
Our employees are probably the number-one vector for change. What we’re starting to see is that offering people that opportunity drives change, delivers results and engages people by encouraging them to bring their whole selves to the challenge. They succeed, the business is better, and we’re accelerating the positive impact we can make.
Pagitsas: How can employees expand their sustainability knowledge?
Hagen: I’m seeing folks from all disciplines start to add sustainable business skills and competencies to their personal tool kit. They are finding more meaning in their job, and they are finding more success. In some cases, this is formal education, such as through an MBA or a graduate certificate in sustainable business, which many universities are offering. In other cases, it’s specific credentials such as for the LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] or BREEAM [Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method] certifications. And sometimes, it’s learning as they go through professional organizations like Net Impact. The common thread I’m seeing is that there is now a mature body of literature in the sustainable business space. Folks are not going to be able to accelerate with on-the-job training as fast as folks who seek out some formal process to accelerate their skills and their career.
Pagitsas: Some people get frustrated by sustainability initiatives, saying there is no way to change the negative impact that businesses are having on climate and society. How would you respond?
Hagen: If we see it as denial or despair, then we’re never going to get to our hope. We could focus on the downsides for business, and the risks are glaring and scary. But there is a bigger opportunity for business which is to be better at business, to deliver better products and services, and to be more profitable, while delivering on more environmental and social benefits as we use the enterprise to drive change. That’s hope.
To paraphrase a thought Paul Hawken offers in his seminal book The Ecology of Commerce [(HarperCollins, 1993; Revised Edition, Harper Business, 2010)], business is the only human institution with the speed, the scale, and the resources to make a big enough change fast enough to matter. That’s my soapbox for the day.