Resources

• Trellis (formerly GreenBiz): Website
• Trellis member network: Introduction
• Trellis major events overview: Bloom (Biodiversity) VERGE (Cleantech) Green Biz 25 and Circularity
• Joel Makower: Biography

Host and Guest

Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative (LinkedIn)

Guest: Joel Makower, Chairman and Co-founder, Trellis Group (LinkedIn)

Transcript

Editor’s Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.

Mike Toffel:

Joel, thank you so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Joel Makower:

Great to be here, Mike. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Mike Toffel:

Joel, let's start with a brief introduction as to what you do at Trellis and how you got there.

Joel Makower:

Yeah, so I'm a journalist by training, although I've been self -employed for my entire career. And if you look at the through line going backwards, almost 50 years, it's really at the intersection of business, technology, and society. Three things about which I am personally passionate. And so I found, had an opportunity in the late 80s to create the US edition of a British best -selling book called The Green Consumer Guide by a guy you may know called John Elkington. And it was published in the run -up to Earth Day 1990. I was very quickly anointed as an expert on green consumer issues and had a weekly syndicated newspaper column and 90 papers and giving speeches and all that.

I quickly realized two things. There was no green consumer movement in the US. I looked over my shoulder and realized I was kind of standing there by myself. And two, that the companies I was being asked to come in and talk to about the so -called green consumer movement were dealing with a number of other issues of their own, the things we still talk about today, waste, water, energy, carbon, toxics. And we're grappling with that. And that was interesting to me. So I started a monthly newsletter, what we would later dub a dead tree snail mail newsletter called the Green Business Letter.

And then I'm old enough to say this sentence. And then the web came along and I created both a home for the newsletter, but they ultimately saw there was an opportunity to create a knowledge hub. There was so much information coming around from companies, from trade associations, from activist groups, from state, local, national, international agencies, consultancies, and so on. And it wasn't being captured. It was very useful to companies on all these topics. So I created Greenbiz.com initially to do that and eventually grew into the company it now is, which was recently renamed Trellis Group, so trellis.net.

And so we have the media, the digital media piece. We do four big events throughout the year, and I can talk more about those later. And then we have a membership group of sustainability professionals called the Trellis Network from mostly large companies and a number of subgroups. And they meet both online and in person to talk about, to share, to learn from one another. We call it peer -to -peer learning. They often call it group therapy.

Mike Toffel:

Great. Well, we're going to talk about all of those different business lines and how they relate. You mentioned Trellis is the new name for what was Greenbiz. I've been following Greenbiz for decades, really. What was the genesis for the name change?

Joel Makower:

Yeah, to be honest, it wasn't my idea. Because my role in the company, nobody reports to me. I don't have an operational role these days. I'm the chairman of the board. I'm still the largest shareholder. So when the team decided that this was important and something we need to refresh, because it's not just green. Green is a little bit of an old construct. They thought biz was sort of old school kind of thing. And I wanted to come up with a new refresh name. you know, Trellis has a number of connotations beyond the obvious, arboreal one that you've referenced. It's an open network of interwoven and interconnected pieces. It's a platform or framework on which to build something of value. It's a support system that provides stability and maybe even signals a direction on where to move. So we like that. And the interconnectedness of all of this, because we have these climate crisis and biodiversity crisis, social justice, crisis, environmental justice crisis, water, toxics, plastics, and all that. It's no longer just a few topics that you can really put your arms around, and it's no longer just the sustainability function inside companies. It really is a lot of interconnected pieces, and so that's the genesis.

Mike Toffel:

Got it. So let's talk a little bit about that scope and we'll focus at least initially here on the digital media piece. So given there's so many ranging topics and geographies and industries to talk about and the fragmentation of the landscape of those who are actually writing about these issues everywhere from large media outlets like the New York Times and the Post and the Guardian to other niche players. There are documentaries now, there's podcasts. How does Trellis decide what's the scope of the editorial coverage that it's going to focus on? How does it decide, you know, so much out there?

Joel Makower:

Yeah. Yeah, great question, Mike. It's a moving target, to be sure. And we've seen over the 20 or so years that we've been around, actually next year will be 25 years since Greenbiz.com was a live website. We've seen a lot of people come and go and a lot of, although in the last few years, obviously these... particularly climate, but also plastics and biodiversity are really rising up as hardcore business issues no longer sitting out there on the doing well by doing good era that the mainstream media and lots of other outlets are now talking about this stuff. So, but we've, you we found that that for all the reporting that's being done, professionals in this space still want to know, what do I do?

And number one and number two, my mantra is that the what of sustainable business is interesting, but the how is where all the value is and sometimes even the why. Why are you doing this? Who? How do you do this? Who owns this? How do you fund it? What's how do you make the business case? Or did there need to be a business case? Who did you have to engage internally to get this done or externally? What have you learned along the way? What were some of the speed bumps and unexpected problems and how did you get around them. What do you know now that you wish you knew then? We don't bring all of that to every story but that's the mindset because this field of people working in sustainability inside companies.

First of all, it's mushrooming. It's no longer just the sustainability department. It's fleets, real estate, operations, supply chain, procurement, marketing, finance, human resources. Pretty much every piece of the company risk has some connectivity to sustainability these days. So the sustainability professional, which kind of used to be in some cases still is, but an island onto its within the company is much more integrated and you know because of all these departments somebody still needs to use American football term quarterback all of this and coordinate it and now that there's a whole reporting mandatory reporting structure that's emerging around the world somebody's got to be responsible for all of that and so you know figuring out how do you how these people actually work together is really, I think, a key to how we like to approach editorial.

Mike Toffel:

Got it. And do you view those folks who often are chief sustainability officers or their direct reports as your key constituents in terms of the readership? Is that who you're writing to?

Joel Makower:

Yeah, we think of communities and certainly if you think of a concentric circles or bullseye, if you will, at the center are sustainability executives at the world's largest companies. Coming out from there are the people that they consort with internally, some of the functions I just mentioned. And then coming out from there are their suppliers, their customers, their other stakeholders, including some of the activist groups or the consultancies or government agencies. And then beyond that is everybody else. And we focus on that bullseye, that center, the sustainability professionals, because if we do that, everyone else wants to come to the party. If you're just focusing on the startups or on the regulatory side, there's going to be limited.

But we're looking at the people who are responsible for this. How do they operate? How do they operate more effectively? What do they need to know? Who's doing what? How do they compare or benchmark themselves, even informally, to what's going on out there in the state of the art. So we have a lot of communities and we use the word community a lot throughout all of our properties, throughout the events, throughout obviously the membership network. There are some communities that circular economy or water or carbon or any number of topics. the last thing I'll say there, Mike, is that we have a really great business model because if you think about media companies, the typical old line media companies, if they like to find out what are their customers thinking, so they'll do a survey once a year or maybe they'll historically at some conference or trade is trade Association. They'll have a luncheon where they'll get 25 or whatever number of people and maybe even have to give them a $50 gift card as an incentive to show up for lunch and then they'll have a little discussion saying what are you thinking about? What's interesting to you these days?

Our best customers pay us to join our membership group to come to our events and they tell us what's uppermost on their minds and as a company that curates content, whether it's the digital media editorial content or content for events, that's a real gift. And so we really have an opportunity every day to learn what's going on with our customers and the communities around that.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, that was a part of the connection between your business lines that I really didn't know until just now. The idea that the events and the digital media feed off each other. And in particular, the events are a way for you to get insight on what topics are popular by what people say in those events and also the attendance. If you have multiple sessions going on at the same time, some are really popular, some are less popular. And that can feed into basically like focus grouping for your editorial strategy. Is that right?

Joel Makower:

Well, the Trellis Network, the membership group that we have is really the focus group because you've got several times a week. One of the communities is meeting and we also have some in person meetings multiple times a year around the US and one in Europe as well. One group in Europe that meets several times a year and you've got, you know, 20 or 25 companies sitting around the table. Chatham House rules so we can talk freely. We just can't identify who's there and they're talking. They're really leaning in. I mean, they're talking about the stuff that's really grappling with this they're succeeding with. They have questions and this is both online and offline and that is such valuable information and you know we and then on top of all that they'll tell us what they think of what we're doing. That story you wrote kind of you know you didn't really get it right or you missed the key point. That session you did was it looked like interesting from the description but it didn't really deliver and here's why. So we get this constant stream of great feedback that we are able to integrate almost in real time.

Mike Toffel:

So do you have one membership group, then you throw out lots of topics and people show up to the ones they want? Or do you actually have multiple communities that are divided by sector, geography, topic?

Joel Makower:

Yeah, so the way companies join at the company level and if you remember company, anyone from your company can join and participate in any of the communities and there's I don't know, seven or eight now and there'll be more to come. Communities, I said, know, carbon, circular economy, nature and biodiversity. And so, you know, a lot of companies say, well, you know, we really need our real estate department to be in part of the biodiversity conversation because they're starting to come up against some of the issues with land use and or carbon, you know, needs to be understand land use because land-based nature-based solutions and sequestering carbon and soil and other things.

And so there's just a lot of connectivity. This is trellis. This is why it's interwoven interconnected grid of topics of relationships of different people in the company forming their own communities internally in different ways and then wanting to be part of their external communities because.

They're all inventing their own wheels here. They're all figuring this stuff out. There has not been a playbook for how you deal with carbon and climate mitigation, adaptation, offsets, any of these things, renewable energy. I mean, we're just starting with some of these topics to get renewable energy. Here's the different models of how you build by, use virtual. There are so many different models that get through the complexities. They're really fast. And so there is no one size fits all at any aspect of sustainability for it, for companies in general.

Mike Toffel:

So this provides both, as you called it, therapy or peer -to -peer knowledge sharing while someone from Chels is in the room facilitating and taking notes, thinking about new story ideas, new resources, maybe new topics for the events that you organize, it sounds like. So these things sort of feed into each other.

Joel Makower:

Yeah, I'd love to say that this was the strategy all along, but as we realized, it sort of evolved and saying, we're getting incredible intel here that we can use to help serve our communities even better in getting this constant flow of feedback that feeds into, again, our events, our editorial digital media content, and then back to the networks.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, it strikes me there's a real parallel to what we do here at Harvard Business School where we have events as well with practitioners where we share some of our insights and they share theirs and we learn a lot about new research ideas or new challenges that we hadn't really thought about. Same with our executive education classrooms where we're again sharing and learning at the same time. So there's that nice sort of synergy of sharing and learning happening at the same time.

Joel Makower:

Well, I have absolutely no qualms about being compared to Harvard.

Mike Toffel:

There you go. So if I were to pick up an anonymized article from Trellis's digital media and similarly from say The Guardian or The New York Times, would you be able to tell where each of those was written based on the content or are they kind of interchangeable?

Joel Makower:

I don't know that they're interchangeable, but I also don't know that I could discern the difference necessarily. And the reason is because there's so many different topics, so many different people writing, and some of them are writing at a more sophisticated level, just because sometimes it's a little bit more of a 101, and sometimes it's a higher level. Sometimes they're digging deep into a particular topic, some aspect of carbon removal, for example. And sometimes it's a higher-level overview. I had a piece recently, in August about adaptation and how that's coming to be more of a thing. And that's a higher-level trend piece. I don't know. We look at other, sometimes we look at things like Bloomberg. Bloomberg Green has some great newsletters and we get one or more of those, and they're very high quality, it's Bloomberg. And sometimes I read one of our pieces and I said, you know, that could easily have been a Bloomberg piece. And there's some Bloomberg ones I said, I wish we had done that, you know, and so, you know, but we're not all the same. So I don't, it's really hit or miss in terms of whether I could tell them apart.

Mike Toffel:

And where do you get your writers from? Are they dedicated environmental reporters? Are they business reporters who are interested in green stuff? Or where do they come from?

Yeah, well we have a really small shop of internal team and then a freelance. I mean, again, there's no one size fits all here. They tend to be, first of all, a good reporter, second, some aspect of business. The sustainability stuff can be learned. The business and reporting stuff is a lot harder. So business reporters are always a good place to start.

Sometimes the people who are, you know, rabbit environmentalists don't make the best report is because they're first of all, just maybe a little too knee -jerk in terms of just accepting everything at face value and saying, you know, yay, solar or whatever cheerleading that is. And sometimes the business reporters look at things too skeptically and don't give companies the benefit of doubt. So we're always trying to find that sweet spot where you can really illuminate, inspire, and inform the audience. And, you know, be critical where it's due and don't be too overly optimistic where it's not due.

But, you know, we don't think of ourselves as way, but other people have called us an honest broker, which is just about right. And, you know, and there are people who think that we're corporate apologists and there are people who think that we're a rabbit environmentalist. And so, you know, we're probably right where we need to be in that in that middle where we're kind of getting attacked or least criticized by both sides. We don't really get attacked all that much. So, you know, finding writers who can address that sweet spot. Not impossible, but being a good, business journalist is a great place to start.

Mike Toffel:

Got it. When you started way back in the 90s with your green business letter, you mentioned that you were sort of a lone provider of that information, at least in the US, on the greenness of products. And now with so much attention to climate and sustainability by so many players, what's the value proposition that you pitch now to readers who might already be subscribing to The Guardian and maybe choosing a more of a niche player between you or Bloomberg or other niche players. What guidance do you give them as to, you know, for this type of stuff, you want us. If you were interested in something else, you want them.

Joel Makower:

Yeah, I'm not quite sure how to get to that. First of we're not just writing about products.

That's actually a relatively small part, writing about corporate strategy and operations and some of that sometimes, particularly when you get into things like circular economy that deals with products. I don't know, Mike, I don't know how to answer that question in terms of what the value proposition is. I guess part of it has to do with the fact that we're the only company that has all of these things combined. There are definitely other events. There are definitely other media organizations. There are a few other networks, but none of them come at all three of those things in an integrated way under one brand. And I think that, you know, when you start to create a brand and people say, I liked your editorial, so let me look at your events or I liked your events. Let me think about joining the network that creates some internal synergies and hopefully value as well to the communities that we serve. But I think, you know, and part of it is just this is all we do.

The Guardian, Bloomberg, New York Times, Fortune, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, pick your HBR, Harvard Business Review, pick your medium. They cover a lot of ground and some of them do very well on sustainability, but that's one of many things they do and this is all we do. And I think that gives us a leg up in many ways in the communities that we serve.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, it strikes me that given the synergies you have, you have like a curation power, which is we want to identify the topics that are most relevant to practitioners right now. And we know they're relevant because we hear them firsthand in these consortia or in the events. And then there's also like, at what level do people need the information? And you're also, since you're hearing the way people are phrasing questions and the way people are answering them, you get a first -hand glimpse as to which types of explanations are resonating. So it seems like you have the what and how piece of all that.

Joel Makower:

Yeah, and it's hard, Mike, because... Different people want different levels. Some people, I think, and this is not an official company thing, this is my own approach and I've communicated this to others and I don't know to what extent they buy into it, but if you think of scale of one to 10, with one has just landed from Mars and 10 has been there, done that for a long, long time, I think we should be aiming around a six and a half or seven. You know, let the newbies catch up. And even the 10s like to see it explain to others because often they've been struggling with how do I explain this to people internally or externally or my family and when we hit that six or seven and they're saying this is a great articulation of something I've been trying to communicate to my team or to whomever. And so that level, but sometimes you want to come in at a one -on -one level and we're always thinking about as we evolve our business model, and this is true of events, also true with the network. Do we create something special for the eights, nines, and tens? I'm just making this up. It's not internal. Or do we create something special for the one, twos, and threes?

And I think companies... Struggle particularly at that of the latter of those groups with you know, there are new people coming in or people who've been seconded from another part of the company and all of a sudden they have to be smart on a particular topic if not sustainability at large. And how do they do that effectively? How do we do that? You know some of its going to be internal company standards and procedures and policies but some of that's going to be what's going on out there in the world and so you know, if we had a bigger team, we had more resources to have a bigger team, we might, you know, start to look at how do you create 101s or 401 kinds of content. But so for now we have to settle for the sort of not one size fits all, but for more finding that, as they call it, the sweet spot.

And, you know, the challenge here is that every company addresses sustainability differently. First of all, they have different drivers, whether it's internal drivers, the CEO or the CFO or someone else, or regulatory drivers, whether it's activists or whether it's customers, particularly B2B customers, whether it's regulation or fear of regulation, whether it's competition with their peer competitors. It's the CEO who it's her last gig and it's a capstone. This is a legacy thing. Or they wake up, they have kids, have grandkids and all of sudden they start looking at the future and they realize, know, we're in a world of trouble. We need to be part of the solution. I've seen it all.

I had a conversation once with the, well, it was on the record, so can tell you this is back in 20 years ago with the then, I think he was an EVP of Gap. He later became the CEO, Bob Fisher, the son of the founder. And turns out Bob and I here are the same age and we had grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area at the same time and radically different paths. And he said, I wasn't an environmentalist. I grew up playing tennis on clay courts. And I didn't really have any of that, even though, you know, we're old enough to have been around during the first Earth Day. And then he got married and then he had kids and then his wife got him a fly-fishing pole. They had a cabin up in, I think, Idaho. And now all of sudden, he's standing in the stream and looking around and thinking about his kids. And all of a sudden, something flipped and he got it. And he said, we need to be at the forefront of this stuff.

And you never know where it's going to come from. I think that's a challenge. I'm coming back to your question, believe it or not, is really that's the challenge of all these different drivers, all these different personalities, all these different levels of knowledge. How do you address them most effectively? That's something that we think about every day.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah. Yeah, I've long thought it would be interesting to compile a bunch of stories about how those corporate leaders who really understand sustainability and the importance of climate change, where they got that understanding from. Because like you, I've heard lots of different stories in lots of different moments where things clicked into place. I just think that'd be interesting to profile. I haven't seen a compilation of those stories yet. Maybe you'll write them.

Mike Toffel:

So let me fast forward all the way to today in the media environment. So when you think about the schism of the fragmentation and there's social media where people are learning about stories through LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter X, other places, Blue Sky now, sometimes people are writing their stories on those platforms and other times they're linking back to the story. And I keep thinking about sort of the what leads people to click, you know, the whole clickbait idea. And I'm wondering if there's a tension that you feel between the urge to get eyeballs on the content and also sort of maintaining the tone and the seriousness and perhaps playfulness that you want to maintain. Is there a tension there that you feel in today's media environment where, again, the competition for eyeballs is so intense?

Joel Makower:

Yeah, I can only speak for us. I mean, a little bit for what I see. We do a little bit on social media, on TikTok and Instagram, and of course, LinkedIn and X and maybe a little Facebook. We don't go for clickbait per se. We do try and we have a head of our editorial team, Allison Fass, who comes from Fast Company and the New York Times and Inc. and who has a real beat on how do you get people to click on a story. But it's not just random people to click on a story just to get clicks. We want the right people coming to these things because as a business, we want them not just to learn from the content, but maybe attend one of our events or think about joining our network and some of the other things that is how we make money.

The digital media piece is the smallest piece of what we do from a revenue perspective and we're trying to grow it and it is growing and quite nicely but events are the biggest and then the membership network. So you know, we don't make a lot of money on clicks and we have some advertising, but that's not how we do it. So we don't think in those terms. We think about what would get someone who's interested in this topic or maybe doesn't even know they're interested in that topic to want to know what is that headline going to be? But we don't create a story that's just something that's just going to get people, you know, not just on a page, but clicking through multiple pages like you see a lot of media companies do.

I don't see a ton of that in at least the media that I track this clickbait. I don't think that's really the issue. I think the bigger issue of naive headlines where people are just too celebratory or too cynical about some whatever the topic is without really looking at some of the nuances. And I'm sure that anybody in any topic if you're interested in accounting or transportation or something you will probably have that same song where the media doesn't really get it and they're too simplistic and they're too critical or too accepting of things that should be more nuanced, but that's really true in this topic where the complexity is enormous and that's before you fold in the politics and just social acceptance of some of these topics.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, I totally agree. The balance between trying to convey nuance while at the same time trying to keep at least the headline level simple enough for people to understand has always been a challenge of work that I've written and work that I read of others as well.

So let's talk about these events. So you mentioned these four events, and I know you have Verge, Greenbiz, Circularity, and Bloom. Can you just give us a couple of sentences about each of them? are they, what are they, what's their objectives? What audiences do they target? Who should come?

Joel Makower:

Well, Greenbiz is our flagship event. now and it's this will be the 17th year coming up in February of 2025. It takes place in Phoenix as for the last number of years, and it's for and about the professional sustainability. So we'll get between 2000 and 2500 sustainability professionals, and they're not all corporates, but a good I think most of them are. But there's also the consultancies and some of the NGOs that want to be around them and some of the smaller players who are trying to get to know the corporate.

So that's our flagship event and as I said our longest running one. I'm going to go throughout the year chronologically. Circularity is about circular economy. That one floats around. That will be in Denver in April in 2025. And that gets a little bit of a different audience which brings in the brand people and the suppliers and maybe R&D and design and of course at the back end the waste managers and how do you take products and turn them back into, take waste, what has been waste and turn them back into assets and resources for future products. So supply chain, procurement, R&D, innovation, brand marketing and all of that.

Bloom is our newest one. It's about business and biodiversity. And so we're looking at food and ag and energy, but anyone who deals with land issues, anyone who deals with carbon, carbon offsets. So we're getting, again, a slightly different, so the built environment weighs in heavily there. That one, it also flows, this one, we're actually gonna be, it coincides with the COP, the UNCOP event on biodiversity, which is called COP16, which will be taking place in Cali, Colombia in the middle of October. So we're going to have our event in Colombia alongside that.

And then our biggest event is Verge, which is about climate tech. And that'll be the last week of October in San Jose. We take over the San Jose Convention Center will get five or 6000 people. There's an expo piece and it's looking at all of these technologies that we need to decarbonize and create circular materials and product flows and water efficiency and energy production and so many other things. And so we'll get venture capitalists and sort of the innovation community as well as the procurement people who are looking to source some of these things, R &D, and relatively small number of sustainability professionals compared to our other events. We could get government agencies that are looking to procure these things and government labs and things like that. each one has a slightly different ecosystem, which is really, we find really exciting.

Mike Toffel:

So Verge and Greenbiz have been running for quite some time now, if I understand it.

Joel Makower:

Yeah, Verge started I believe in 2011. whatever this is, this will be our 13th or 14th year. And then Bloom just started a years ago, Circularity maybe six years ago.

Mike Toffel:

And how has Verge changed over time?

Joel Makower:

Well, it certainly changed along, when you know, I'm sure, and I'm sure a lot of your viewers and listeners know the hype cycle, Gartner hype cycle where you have this peak of inflated expectations followed by the trough of disillusionment, the slope of enlightenment, and the plateau of productivity. And a lot of innovation happens at that trough of disillusionment. It happened in the dot com era after the dot com crash in 2000, 2001.

And Verge was really born during the cleantech 1.0 crash. Remember, Solyndra was politicized and I was an advisor to one of the big venture capital firms in Silicon Valley and didn't really make money on any of the companies except for one car company by a guy called Elon but most of it did not manifest into anything and there was just a lot of disillusionment and verge was really born at that moment saying that it's not just the technologies it's the convergence which is really where verge came from as much as anything as well as being on the verge of these great opportunities, the convergence of corporates and startups, but also the convergence of all these technologies. What happens when you put energy technologies and building technologies and transportation technologies and the Internet of Things and robotics and now AI and green chemistry and all of these things together that individually are powerful, but together are amazing. What happens and how do you pull those together?

All of those fields have come and have their ups and downs. And now in this world of climate and climate tech and decarbonization are really coming into their own. Verge has really taken off and tracked that. There's lots of events around energy. There are events around buildings. There are events around transportation. But none that really look at how these pieces fit together and where are the convergence opportunities? Where are the synergies? How do we make one plus one equal 11 and really get further faster.

Mike Toffel:

Got it. Well, that's super interesting. I compared your organization to HBS before, I'll do so again. One of the challenges that academics have in their scholarly writing and their writing in practitioner outlets like HBR and others, even in our classroom or even in this podcast, is not really knowing very well what the impact is of each of these pieces. You can sort of track clicks or subscriptions or downloads.

But whether people are actually taking this in and going, that's good to know, but don't actually act on it, or whether it actually leads someone to start a business or to not start a business because the opportunity is not as good as they thought it was, how do you think about impact of these various activities?

Joel Makower:

Yeah, that's a really great question. When someone starts an answer by saying that's a really good question, that's often code for I don't really know.

I mean, we grapple with this all the time and this goes back and I left out one small piece of the story that's only relevant now, which is that when I first started this this knowledge hub called Greenbiz, I did it as a nonprofit and then five or six years later, ended up buying the IP and creating the company. But when we were a nonprofit, one of our earliest funders was Bank of America. Right. And they wrote us a check. And a year later, I went back to see her. She wasn't this CSO because they didn't have that then, but the head of sustainability for B of A and I sit down in her office and first words out of her mouth is “Joel, first of all, I have to thank you.” I'm like, thank me. You wrote me a check for twenty five thousand a year ago and she said, this is 2002. Let's say 2001, maybe. A month ago, I got a call from upstairs and the banks needed a climate policy. And I'm like, how am I going to do that? And I went on this website. Your website is Knowledge Hub. And I found about 80 % of what I needed. It saved weeks and weeks of time. Thank you. And so my question there is, because people ask all the time, where's your impact? I'm saying, tell them that story. I'm saying, what credit do we get?

Joel Makower:

We don't get to claim any carbon reductions by Bank of America or anything of the sort, but we were there to do exactly what we were built to do. And that's the challenge. Now as 25 years later as a company, we have lots of anecdotal things.

You know, met somebody, they started an initiative, they created a new product, they found a new job, they, you know, there's all kinds of things that we have anecdotally. But Mike, there's no way to measure that.

Joel Makower:

And not in any meaningful way that anyone would say, you know, that's a great metric. Yeah, we have clicks and page views and all the things that a digital media would come. We have event attendance. We have something called Net Promoter Scores, which how people are doing. But that's not the impact in the world. That's just the impact that we're getting as a company. So no, I don't know anybody who solved that problem. I would love to know how you know, how what's the cause and effect between information and knowledge and wisdom or data or anything else and actually a company doing something that has an impact on the planet.

Yeah, I think the bigger question, Mike, is not, you know, how do I measure my impact? It’s what's the vision of someone in our community? What's the world they want to create? Or as I like to say, what's the story they get to tell if they get things right? Or what's the story we all get to tell if we get things right? And so many companies don't have that story yet. And we as a community spend a lot of time celebrating incrementalism. And so when it comes to impact, the real question is what's the vision?

Joel Makower:

You know, what do you want to do? What do you want to see? And we're at this point now where because of the regulatory scheme and the reporting and the anti -greenwashing, we used to be a time where Walmart's a great example. They said, we want to be 100 % renewable, power zero waste and have a bunch of green products. And this is in 2005.

They didn't say by when they didn't know how they're going to get there, but they just put it out there and said we're going to do this. Apple has said that we want to our create products that where nothing comes from the earth, where all the materials from iPhone or MacBook or whatever it is come from recycled or refurbished or reused or some other source. They didn't say by when they show progress against that these days. And there's a number of companies that just made these aspirational goals even commitments. And you can't do that anymore without being really specific in ways that companies are probably afraid to do.

Because look, companies are cutting back on their climate goals or their dates or their net zero goals or any number of things. So it's really hard to be aspirational here. So I know I'm getting a little bit off topic from measuring impact. But I think the bigger question is, is how do you gauge the opportunity and what's the end goal you have in mind? And is it just to be a little bit less bad or is it to be transformationally good?

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, it seems to me in the vast majority of cases, it's to be a little bit less bad or maybe even a lot less bad. We profiled some companies on the show that are really trying revolutionary new approaches to create products that are dramatically less environmentally impactful. But most that we read about or that we talk about are incremental. I think the idea that people are backing away from some of those goals, there's a glass half empty way of looking at that and a glass half full way of looking at that. On the one hand, you're like, jeesh, are people actually cutting back on their efforts? Is it less important now than they thought it was? Or is the pressure to actually follow up and the scrutiny that are being applied to companies growing such that people are backing away from pledges that they didn't really do enough due diligence in the first place to have confidence that they would, they would actually be able to achieve.

Joel Makower:

Or has this become so much part of the fabric of companies and so unremarkable that it's just happening without a lot of fanfare and happening much more quietly because it's harder to talk about this stuff where you set yourself up as a target sometimes when you talk about what you're doing, write you off, and even illuminate problems that the public didn't know you had. And that's problematic. And the answer to which of these is yes, it's happening at all of these in all

Mike Toffel:

So let me ask about what topics you see coming down the pike that you think is going to get more importance. You mentioned adaptation. We've talked about biodiversity. These are topics that I think are, that I see a growing importance that are getting a little more attention finally. The nexus between corporate action and corporate lobbying or campaign contributions. You sort of see that percolating here and there. I think more attention hopefully will be paid to that because that's about system change the rules and regulations are. Those are my three that I'll throw out there. Do you think those are three reasonable ones and what else is on your mind?

Joel Makower:

Yeah, those are good ones. I mean, I'm just really interested in AI, artificial intelligence. And we spend a lot of time looking at, the carbon emissions, the energy use, the water use, the deep fakes and all the problems. And yes, we ignore those at our peril. But there's a world of possibilities here. And if you look at what we're trying to do, in energy, water, waste, toxic, carbon, all these different things, material flows, they're incredibly complex value chains or loops or networks or meshes or whatever, however you describe it.

That's what AI does. AI takes that complexity and makes sense of it in really much faster. And looking at data, looking at reports, or looking at reams and reams of data and saying, how do we make sense of this? And where are the interesting pieces of this for whatever we're looking for? And AI, you look at the built environment, if you look at transportation and mobility, if you look at materials and manufacturing, food and agriculture, land use and real state, every one of those fields and many more, AI has a stance to be transformational, to help us get much further faster, to help us get beyond the doing less bad to doing more good. I think, you know, and we need to balance that out with the problems and the challenges. And a lot of those are being addressed and hopefully at the scale, scope and speed that we need. I don't mean to be Pollyannish about that or cavalier, but this is an opportunity space that's maybe unlike any other that I've seen in the 35 years that I've been in this space.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, no, it is very exciting. I personally liken it to the birth of the internet where we were tinkering initially at first, but everyone knew there'd be potential, but they weren't exactly sure what that potential was. And I feel like that's a little bit now with AI.

Joel Makower:

And do I really need a website? Why would I want to build a website? I've got a store, you know, and yeah, and people are thinking about it in those terms. And I think, you know, this will be as disruptive or more so than the Internet.

Mike Toffel:

Yeah, exactly. Right.

Yeah. So the final question I want to pose to you is the question I ask all of our guests with regard to advice. So what advice do you give to those listeners who want to make an impact on climate change in some manner? I know that you get this question all the time over the years in your role.

Joel Makower:

Yeah, I get a lot of incoming that how do I get into this space? I'm a recent grad or I'm about to go to college or I'm a mid-career professional or I'm late in my career, but I still have some one or two more acts in me that I want to be able to. And I really want to focus on sustainability or climate, however they frame it. Sometimes it's just green. And so they all come at it differently with different skill sets and different questions. I guess my first rule of thumb is that if you want to be in sustainability, well let me tell you, when I went to journalism school I got an undergrad degree in journalism and mine was the last year at Berkeley that you could get an undergrad degree in journalism. They abolished the undergrad program, not because of me, and they basically said if you want to be a journalist, sure, take some writing classes, but go learn something. Learn science, learn history, learn sports, learn geology, whatever it is, learn economics, learn something. And then bring your journalistic skills into that. And I think that's a great analogy here, which is if you want to be in sustainability, sure, learn about some of these issues, but go learn something. Learn accounting or finance. Learn marketing or communications. Learn supply chain, international trade, any number of issues, and bring your green gene to that topic. And I think people really want to go right to it. First off there aren't that many green jobs, pure play, what people see, often referred to, inside companies or government or anywhere else. There will still be few and far between and they're hard to get because people get them and they stick around and there's always people that they bring in underneath them who are the next in line.

So how do you bring that to whatever you're really interested in beyond that? And I think that's what we need. We need people across industries, across functions, across disciplines to be thinking about what are the implications of this? So I really encourage people to dig deep in a topic and then think about, how do I bring sustainability to that topic?

Mike Toffel:

Got it. Yep. And that's interesting. That's very much aligned with the advice that I give as well. Like think about what's the function or the industry that you want to work in. Learn as much as you can about that and then apply the sustainability or green or climate lens to that. I think, you know, as you noted, there's just not that many jobs for people that start with green or sustainability. And to the extent that they are, you're always a better candidate if you've got deep skill sets that enable you to integrate with the business or the rest of the organization.

Joel Makower:

Yeah, and increasingly a lot of those are accounting within sustainability, tracking data, and they're very, they get deep into the weeds pretty quickly and you need to have those skill sets before you have sustainability skills.

Mike Toffel:

Great. Well, thank you so much for this very wide-ranging conversation. It's been really interesting, Joel, and it's been a pleasure to meet you finally after all these years of subscribing to Greenbiz and now Trellis. It's been a real joy.

Joel Makower:

Thank you, Mike. I really enjoyed the conversation.