Season 2, Ep. 4 | Transcript

​More Elephant Intro

[00:00:38] Jason Rudman: So it's time for a new conversation on the More Elephant Podcast. And my guest today is Noel Kinder, who is a senior global operations executive with over 20 years of building, shaping and transforming businesses, and so, a perfect intersection with what the More Elephant platform and what our conversations are about, which is about ideas and change agents reshaping how we think about the world.

Most recently, Noel was the chief sustainability officer for Nike and he successfully drove the acceleration of Nike's material innovation strategy to align their sustainability ambitions with being a leader in the corporate sustainability space and building that organization from 75 to 300 plus people, ultimately integrating sustainability leadership, processes and programs into major functions across the organization.

But there's a whole lot of history that got know it, know all. There's a whole lot of history that got Noel to that point, as well as an intriguing conversation about what he's thinking about now. So with that, Noel, welcome to the More Elephant Podcast.

[00:01:48] Noel Kinder: Thanks Jason. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

[00:01:50] Jason Rudman: So I always start in this place, it seems to resonate with our listeners, which is before we get to all of the greatness, we have to talk about the great people and the great experiences that got you there and what is essentially your origin story.

There is, I know, a connection to 70s idealism and a yearning to do the Peace Corps. And somehow you found your way to Nike.

So if you could take the audience back to where it all started.

[00:02:18] Noel Kinder: Sure. Well I was raised in the Northwest, grew up in Portland, Oregon and my parents were both hippies.

They were children of the late sixties and early seventies. They were effectively teenagers when they got together and my mom was still a teenager, at 19, when I was born. So you can imagine what the household was like in that era.

And my parents, just kind of by virtue of their values that of course instilled in myself and my brother, that kind of drive to have a positive impact on the world.

My father ultimately became a registered nurse. He worked in the Veterans Administration Hospital in Portland, Oregon. And to this day, still says that those days at bedside were a privilege for him to really take care of people.

And my Mom always had this burning desire to make the world a better place. And so, they drag us out into the coastal range of Oregon, and the sloppy wet weather of October and November, to hunt for mushrooms. And the whole experience of that ethos that I was raised with and the act of putting us in touch with nature, however miserable it may have been at the time, that's really part of my origin story. 

That core belief that we're here to obviously make ourselves better along the way, but to make the world around us a better place too. And so that really has been at my core for as long as I've been in the workforce.

And so as I've moved through the course of my career, I expressed that kind of core drive in a number of different ways. I've went to the University of Oregon, which has a reputation, at least it did back then, of being kind of a bastion of hippie ideals.

When I graduated, I worked job for a publishing company here [in Oregon] and ultimately wound up being a Peace Corps volunteer which, for those listeners that aren't familiar with that, is a U. S. government volunteer program where you're deployed to developing countries to try to make them better places.

So I spent about two years in Southern Honduras working on water projects, potable water projects, for very small communities, many of whom had never had much water before.

And that was a really transformational experience, as you can imagine, not only personally, but spiritually—just a tremendous amount of growth for me, not only through just the experiences I have, but the adversity that I went through.

I was there for Hurricane Mitch in 1998, which killed more than 11, 000 people and basically wiped every brick of infrastructure off the face of the planet as it related to Honduras at the time.

So, you know, those kinds of experiences are pretty transformational, particularly given that, you know, you work so hard over the course of a couple of years to really have an impact and to see that devastation completely destroy any progress you made. That was challenging to say the least.

So, when I made it back to the US, I spent a little bit of time kind of recovering from that experience and then wound up running a nonprofit Latino gang intervention, close to Portland, for about six months. And then kind of backed my way into a job at Nike.

So, that was a really kind of serendipitous experience. I love to share that story because it's a series of synchronicities that are really hard to explain.

When I came back from the Peace Corps, I was living in Northwest Portland with my then girlfriend, now wife. And I was walking down the street and I bumped into one of my best friends from college who went into the Marine Corps as I went into the Peace Corps. We happened to literally find each other five years later after not speaking for that period of time. And he was getting married. 

I went to his wedding and his mom had been at Nike since it was Blue Ribbon Sports and she offered me a job. So that was the beginning of a 25-year career.

[00:05:42] Jason Rudman: You mentioned the Honduras experience was significant and also I'll use the word traumatic, in terms of being there in the middle of a hurricane. You come back to the U.S.

How would you define what that taught you that resonates with where you find yourself today in terms of the work that you want to do?

[00:06:04] Noel Kinder: I think the thing that I learned in hindsight from that experience was the need to be patient when you're driving change, when you're acting as an agent of change.

I have not been a particularly patient person over the course of my life. And that experience is tough.

I mean, you're trying to drive change in an environment where you're not from there—it's obvious that you're not from there. You're an outsider. You're an outsider from a developed country trying to do work in a developing country.

There are all kinds of preconceived notions about who you are. You have all kinds of preconceived notions about who you're working with. You're trying to do that in a language that you don't speak; at least I didn't well when I first got there.

You're navigating bureaucracy, corruption, crime. And so I think while I didn't probably learn the lesson in the moment, because I was literally snatched out of the country and evacuated under pretty dire circumstances, looking back on it, I think I recognize all of the different pieces that really have to fit together and the patience that you have to have to learn how those pieces fit together in order to really drive change.

And I'd probably throw in that there are some things you just cannot control. And you have to understand that you have to let those go.

It's really easy to get frustrated by them. No question about it. I mean, not in the context of being a Peace Corps volunteer or working in a massive company like Nike, focus on the things the levers that you can pull and the things that you can control.

I wish I had known that m…[had] been as insightful back then as I am now.

[00:07:25] Jason Rudman: I'm a little bit more seasoned than you are. I know that for sure in terms of age, and yeah, just in terms of age, not in terms of experience. I cannot hold a candle to what we're about to talk about.

However, I, like you, have learned that. I call it naturally impatient, right?

Because you see the potential impact of what you want to do and you just want to accelerate your way through it. And then, with the team that I have, sounds like very similar to what you said, that you've also got to be really focused on the controllable controllables.

So I think that is a good piece of wisdom that, like you, I wish I'd known earlier would have saved me a lot of anxiety, I think, in terms of corporate work that I did. 

[00:08:06] Noel Kinder: Of course. 

It's just one of those lessons that, you know, I'm sure you try to teach your children. I try to teach my children that if you set a trajectory in mind and create a vision, you develop a strategy to support the achievement of that vision, there are going to be twists and turns along the way and that's okay.

In some cases that actually will help accelerate you if you use it that way. But you can't control every step in the path. You just have to keep focusing on that horizon.

[00:08:30] Jason Rudman: And so difficult to let go sometimes and just, you know, again, focus on the things that you actually have control over. 

So, serendipity leads you to Nike through a friend at a wedding whose mom was working at Nike. So you joined Nike. What were your aspirations when you first joined?

[00:08:51] Noel Kinder: Well, it was a really interesting time because again, kind of this notion of serendipity,

I had been in Honduras in; I left in 1998. And, that was the early days of the sweatshop controversy for Nike and I was completely unaware of that when I was in Honduras. 

At the time, the family I rented my house from where I was stationed in the Peace Corps, the younger woman, the daughter of the mother that owned the house, had a couple of young kids. She was in her mid-twenties and she was always agonizing as to whether or not she should leave her kids with her Mom, move to the Northern part of the country to work in one of these garment factories.

And so, that was really all I knew about it at the time. I had no idea who those factories made garments for. I didn't know anything about the controversy around it. And the struggle that she had was that she could continue to stay where she was with her kids and run this kind of catering business—is probably overstating—but they would make food and go sell it in the city every weekend.

Or she could move to the Northern part of the country, much more industrialized, working in a proper role, proper job, making a proper salary and quite a bit more money. But the tradeoff was she was gonna have to leave her kids and that decision, she never made that decision one way or the other by the time I left.

When I got to Nike, again, this was the height of this controversy, right? It was early days. And so while I took a job in footwear quality, in the back of my mind, I was like, okay, I know this subject better. I know the country where this thing really came to life. I know that the stakeholders, I know the language, I know the geography, I know the politics.

And so that was really my goal— to somehow find my way into a position where I could help with that, given the recent experience that I had.

And the irony was —I've talked to a lot of people earlier in their career about this dynamic—is that, yeah, lots of coffees and informational interviews and expressing my passion and enthusiasm and nobody thought I was qualified to do that work.

Somewhat ironic and maybe a little bit vindicated later in my career that I wound up running that function, but you know, at the time it was not meant to be. And so, I dove into what I was hired to do, which was to understand what was good and bad about the quality of Nike's product and use that to make better product. 

[00:10:58] Jason Rudman: So if I play that back, right, and I connect that to your idealism, the origin story was grounded in this idealism of your parents and a great wet Oregon, at one with nature, and you then have to fall back on well, okay, I'm going to figure out footwear, right.

Somehow that leads to this next opportunity, right. Leading sourcing and planning at a global level, covering a supply network of 500 plus factories in 50 plus countries.

So that's a leap from this idealistic young guy, done some amazing things, got transported out of Honduras. You know what you want to do. You get to the organization, the organization says, yeah, great, that's fine you've got that idealistic notion of what you've come in and do—now run footwear, or figure out how footwear works.

And then you get this opportunity to think about sourcing and planning at a global level. How does that manifest? And then just for the audience, what is sourcing and planning for an organization like Nike? What does that mean at scale? 

[00:12:06] Noel Kinder: Yeah. I was really fortunate that over the first six, seven, eight years of my career, I was given a lot of diverse opportunities to learn, whether in the operations, in what Nike would call product creation, understanding how footwear was designed and manufactured to ultimately some time in finance and strategy.

And then, yeah, that manifested itself into an opportunity to run what was called at the time, the sourcing and supply planning function for global apparel. And in simple terms, it's the team that effectively decides which factories are going to make which products, and ensures that those products are delivered on time to the commercial entities, whether it's a retail partner or a Nike retail outlet.

And so, the decision making criteria was, as we started to develop that, was the first time that I think I really understood the integration of things like sustainability into a daily rhythm of a business, period. 

You know, your first task in a role like that is to make sure that the right product winds up at the right place at the right time for the right cost of the right quality. 

So everything has to click. Cost, quality, delivery and sustainability were the four main criteria that we use to decide which factories would get which orders. And it wasn't always that straightforward, but in simple terms, those were the criteria that we used to make those decisions.

And that meant we started to institutionalize sustainability as one of the criteria that we used to make those decisions.

Did a factory adhere to our code of conduct?

Were they passing the audits that we expected of them every year?

Had they had any issues? And those could be anything from proper payment of overtime to wastewater discharge appropriately. 

The gamut of what we would call sustainability at that time. And I think it was the first time that I went, Oh, I get it. This is how this can work. What was interesting about it at the time was that the factories that were really good at the sustainability stuff that were proactive, it wasn't just a check the box activity, it wasn't just a compliance activity, the factories were really good.

Actually, they were really good at other things too. It was a leading indicator of their sophistication, of their ability to innovate, their willingness to grow and metabolize the growth that we needed to grow the brand. And again, it wasn't always that straightforward. Of course, there are twists and turns in a journey like that.

But I think it was really the first time in my career that I understood the integration of sustainability and, what everybody would call ESG today and how it can be an indicator for value creation and the ability to grow and innovate.

[00:14:32] Jason Rudman: Let's pull that thread a little bit more because what you set up there, I think, is this interesting exploration of the definition of sustainability.

We so often go to the appropriate use of raw materials, in order to contain and not exploit diminishing resources. And then you started your exploration here and the recognition of this was my first expression of, ah, I feel like I'm starting to do what it is that I was probably put on this earth to do. And you started with labor practice. 

And so, would you take the audience on a bit more of an expansive definition of sustainability, which I think is beyond simply use, reuse, transformation of raw materials to not diminish or deplete what the Earth provides.

[00:15:20] Noel Kinder: Yeah, I would agree. It's more expansive than just environmental sustainability. I mean, you know, really the perspective that we took when I was at Nike, and Nike still does today is that sustainability is a pretty broadly defined term.

You have the treatment of workers that make our products, right? So, how are the big factories that are employing those workers being treated, are they paid appropriately or their working hours what they're supposed to be? Are they given growth opportunities?

It moved over the years. It moved from a check the box compliance activity to what are we doing to actually make sure that, in the spirit of sustainability being an indicator for growth and innovation, what else can be done to improve the worker experience so that retention rate is better. The higher retention rate means better product quality; better product quality means better consumer satisfaction, right?

So it very quickly became an indication of, again, kind of greater sophistication and greater possibility to drive value, whereas it started, obviously, in a pretty acute place way back in the late 90s and early 2000s. 

And so, for me, particularly when I was Chief Sustainability Officer, sustainability had an enterprise definition. It was everything from how are we innovating to develop new materials or new manufacturing processes that were lower carbon, less waste, all things that are good from a corporate value standpoint as well as a planet standpoint, to how are we being more efficient with the way that we ship products around the world?

How are we engaging with our manufacturing partners to ensure that the workforce is viewed as an asset that can actually contribute to the growth, not only of that manufacturer, but to the brand overall?

And so I think if you really start to think of it as not just a standalone thing on its own. That's about doing the right thing. Doing the right thing, to me, if you're doing it right, it's integrating it across the enterprise so that it continues to create innovation; that innovation drives value, can often drive profitability, expansion margin expansion.

It's just kind of a no brainer to me. But I think you have to shift from this save the world mentality to, yeah, we're doing it absolutely because it's the right thing to do, but it's also the right thing to do for the business.

[00:17:28] Jason Rudman: Yeah, the business case of sustainability, right? And I think to your point, it is so much broader than just the materials that we put in our daily wear.

So, from the sourcing role, you then take on and, I think you like a little bit of chaos for what it's worth, right? So, then you become the general manager of Nike Vietnam.

And so talk to us about Vietnam in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, Nike's expression in Vietnam, and then the chaos that ensued. And you’re General Manager. You've got the whole value chain.

Talk us through that experience and what the More Elephant moment was there. What did that teach you about this journey that you're on to continue to elevate and push forward the thinking around sustainability?

[00:18:17] Noel Kinder: It's a great question. And unquestionably, that was one of my favorite jobs.

It was an incredible experience for myself professionally and for my family. Vietnam has a really special place in my heart. It's an amazing country. Incredibly diverse. Yeah. I just can't say enough great things about my time in Vietnam. And you know, professionally, it was a pretty big step for me. It was the first kind of General Manager job that I had. You know, taking my family across the Pacific to live in a place that none of them have ever been before and so, it was a moment certainly for all of us.

And I think the moment for me professionally was, you know, there's a big difference between running a function like sourcing and supply, which was a big job, no question, but being a general manager and in that case, being the most senior person in the country. That was a big step for me.

And, from a leadership standpoint, it was a really important one because, to be a good general manager, you really have to release control; to understand that while I had plenty of experience in footwear, manufacturing, planning, all of those kinds of things, I was not an expert in any of them and I had really, really good people who I worked with who knew far more about that stuff than I did.

That was a really important experience for me to have that team to understand what their roles were, how I could help them, stay out of their way appropriately.

It was a really chaotic time, to use your word, because the transportation partnership trade agreement was being negotiated at the time and we, at the time, we thought there was a very strong likelihood that that would pass and the U. S. would be involved. And so we were hosting a lot of congressional delegations, we were spending time talking to the Vietnamese government all the way up to the president's office, the prime Minister's office.

And so it was a tremendous amount of fun. It was a lot of fun. I really felt like I was in the belly of the beast at the time. And it again reinforced that notion that sustainability has to be part of all of the gears of the machine turning at the same time.

For example, when we had an increase in orders that may look like it would exceed a factory's stated capacity, we would have a conversation with them and say, okay, hey look, can you guys metabolize this?

What are you going to do to make sure that you're still going to comply with the code of conduct? Ensure that the agreements that we've all made over the years will still be part of the agreement and you'll continue to perform in that space as well as deliver the things that we need.

Again, a big part of that for me as general manager, because I was responsible for those relationships, was an indication—how are they going to manage this little bit of adversity and balance all of the expectations that were put on them at the same time.

Then, in I guess it was 2014, there were some anti-China riots in South Vietnam and, in simple terms, there was a Chinese National Oil Company part of a drilling rig in Vietnamese territorial waters and that was not viewed positively by a lot of people in Vietnam. Unfortunately, it degenerated into roving bands thousands of people on motor scooters targeting what they perceived to be Chinese businesses, and, at the time we worked with a lot of Taiwanese partners. And so, if you see Chinese characters, whether they're Taiwanese or mainland Chinese, it's not really important in that circumstance. Those businesses were targeted and it was really tough.

It was tough for factory partners. There were moments that their lives were endangered. The senior leaders of factories—we had to evacuate a number of people on our team of Chinese descent because we were concerned about their safety. It was one of those leadership moments where your instincts kick in and the first duty you have is to ensure that everybody's going to be okay. And unfortunately, some of the factors that meant Nike products were attacked and burned pretty severely. In fact, I saw some photos the other day and they're striking.

But I think the thing that I learned is the value of relationships—the relationships I had with the people that ran those factories, the relationships that I had with my team, the demonstration that we showed to our team that we were putting their safety first. We were trying our best through any channel we had to help those partners that we had get through this as best they could, both on the initial safety side, as well as on the recovery side. That means a lot. And taking a partnership approach and taking a long view versus a transactional approach will really pay dividends in times of crisis whether that's something as severe as those riots, or even just day-to-day, if they have a lapse in production or cost or sustainability, the depth of that relationship will really help you navigate that 

[00:22:38] Jason Rudman: We should amplify that at the time you were there, I don't know if it's still the case, Nike was the country's largest indirect employer to the Vietnamese government. So, this was not a minor expression of Nike around the globe and indeed the importance to the Vietnamese government in terms of employment and sustainability from an economic perspective. So, two questions…

One is, in terms of Nike, largest indirect employer to the Vietnamese government, how did that play into the work that you did?

And then, what were the environmental circumstances or environmental challenges at that time in Nike as was related to footwear production?

[00:23:20] Noel Kinder: Yeah. I don't know what the statistics are now. I mean, there's been a credible amount of development in Vietnam since certainly since I left in 2016. 

And at the time, we were one of the biggest indirect employers in the country. Companies like Intel and auto manufacturers were moving in very quickly. So, there were a number of other industries there, but it creates the opening for a dialogue with a number of stakeholders, whether it's local government or national government. That's really important.

I had a fantastic government affairs director. She was really, really well connected and we were always very deliberate about how we use that connectivity. Toward the end of my tenure, started to talk about renewable energy in the equation.

We knew that we were going to be there for the long term. It was one of the biggest source countries by volume that Nike had. And we knew that in order for us to really start to achieve the goals that we had put out into the world from a sustainability standpoint, our contract manufacturing footprint was key to that. So, things like renewable energy and the availability of it to our manufacturing partners was going to be important.

To your second question, some of the biggest challenges because it was a developing country, was things like waste management infrastructure. And, well before I was ever in Vietnam or CSO or anything even related to that space, the team at Nike had done a really good job of working on developing some basic recycling infrastructure to support a program that Nike has still to this day called Nike Regrind, where post industrial waste is used in a number of other products, whether it's carpet potting at Home Depot or sound deadening panels in Europe. There are all kinds of uses for this product. 

That's one of the great things about working for a company that's innovative as Nike—you get to use that innovation to help solve problems that may not necessarily be directly related to the product. And in this case, it was Hey, how do we lean in and help our manufacturing partners be better stewards of the waste that's just created by virtue of the manufacturing process?

That was probably the biggest challenge at the time because, at least in the U.S., you roll your garbage can out to the street and somebody comes and picks it up and takes it away and that's not always the case in a developing country, to say the least.

[00:25:16] Jason Rudman: It is not. I had the opportunity to go to Southeast Asia about 18 months ago and hadn't been to that part of the world in a long time. I was in Cambodia and Laos. I had done Singapore, Thailand, but the reason I bring Cambodia and Laos up, to your point around Vietnam is, it was low season, so we were going out on boats on the rivers and what it reveals is houses on sticks and a lot of plastic.

To your point, sustainability requires us to take a look at what's thrown off from that production process and figure out how to put it back into the system in a meaningful way.

And I think this whole conversation is about how we continue to think at an elevated level to drive increasing sustainability through those parts of the world, where again, we make this piece of footwear that sits on a shelf in LA, which is where I am right now. 

[00:26:05] Noel Kinder: Yeah, no question. And I think it starts to touch on a really important point for any company that manufactures anything.

A lot of it's done in the developing world and if you just focus on carbon emissions, virtually all of a supply chain is a scope three carbon emission, right? And unfortunately, that's the hardest part to solve.

And so, there's a lot of discussion these days if you follow some of the noise in the ESG space around companies backing off their commitments. Companies abandoning commitments entirely. 

And I understand why, because I think that there was this movement, four or five years ago, certainly when I first became CSO at Nike, where everybody was committing to everything.

Everybody was making these aspirational commitments and, I would argue, without a real clear sense of how they were going to achieve those. And, here we are five, six years later and I think there's some companies that are realizing, oh wow, we're not sure we're gonna get there.

I think that if you're diligent and I think with all the regulation that's coming in Europe, you're going to be required to continue to disclose what your footprint is, whether it's waste footprint or carbon footprint or whatever it may be. I think that there's a big component because so much of Swift 3 emissions you don't control—back to our own original premise of driving change—that it's okay to identify that you don't control it in a place like Vietnam or Honduras, whether that's waste or carbon, but identify what are the levers you can try to influence to help drive that change, right? 

Because, you can't just throw your hands up and say, Well, I don't control the power grids in those places. True—but if you have an open channel with stakeholders in that place, you can at least express the demand or the desire for more access to those kinds of things to help drive things in the right direction.

[00:27:39] Jason Rudman: I feel like that's a call to a recommitment between NGOs, corporations, governments, right?

You and I were talking, global warming in the last 12 months, to surpass the 1.5 Celsius marker that the Paris Agreement said all nations would sign on, or most of the world's nations, would sign on to in 2015.

So, regardless of your politics, this is not a political show. The world is getting warmer. We know that. I live in LA. I think we've seen more rain in the last couple of years than we've seen in the recent past. You're in neck of the woods frequently. I'm in Washington. The Washingtonians would say, yep, the winter was wetter.

What you're talking about is this recommitment, not the shying away. It could be a restating of these grandiose goals that we have, but we can't walk away from that because the world is getting harder.

I was listening to the BBC the other day and they were talking about environment in Africa and a need for fossil fuel And government says, it's easy for the developed world to turn around and say, I shouldn't use these things, but at the end of the day, I need access to a cheaper source of power in order to grow my economy.

How do you reflect on where we find ourselves now and that ESG commitments being pulled back, this need to recommit on maybe fewer things, but more deliberate, to solve some of the things you and I are staring at and saying that if we keep going down that path, we know how this is going to end.

[00:29:04] Noel Kinder: You use the critical term, just fewer things, right? 

Focus on the things that you can actually drive impact on. And I think that was the mistake that a lot of entities, and I won't just blame corporations for this, made during that period where, you know, it was a few years after the Paris Climate Accord, science-based targets were really starting to take off. And, companies rightly, I think, felt the need to play in that space.

But now the order of the day is pragmatism. Focus on fewer things that drive more impact. And that doesn't give you a hall pass from the things that you influence. Like I said, there's certain things like power grids in developing countries that have a huge impact, but to state that you're going to absolutely, for example, be carbon positive by 2050?

I mean, those are fantasy goals if we're being honest and they're so far out that it's hard to really drive a plan to have any impact on them.

As we talked about before, finding the places where you really can drive impact and it's synchronous with the business. One of my favorite examples is, as tactical as it is, in the footwear and apparel industry is air freight.

Air freight is incredibly carbon intensive. It's also really, really expensive. And so, it's one of those places where you can go, Hey, look, if we can cut our air freight by X, we can save this much money and this much carbon emission. There was a great example of the European team at Nike, the distribution team, where basically on their own volition, completely redesigned the boxes that digital orders went into so that they could get more boxes into a truck— more efficient shipping is lower costs per unit and lower carbon emissions per unit.

Now you can make the argument that maybe in absolute terms, carbon emissions go up because people buy more stuff. But, I do think the mentality, it needs to be valued to say sustainable materials are super, super important. No question about it in the footwear and apparel industry. There are things that you can do that are accretive to the business from a revenue growth or profitability standpoint that are relatively low-hanging fruit.

And sure, you're going to get to a point where those things are exhausted and you're going to have to focus on more innovative things that may cost you more in the short-term but I really think that we're in an age now where pragmatism is the order of the day, especially in an environment where regulatory regimes are going to force you to show your homework. You can't get off the aspirational stage anymore. 

[00:31:09] Jason Rudman: Yeah. It's fascinating watching the Europeans particularly take a look at this, right? They seem to be the testing ground for lots of things. Privacy, sustainability, environmental protections and the fault. 

I want to spirit it forward to your most recent role, Chief Sustainability Officer for Nike. And a two part question, less about the role and more about the importance of that within Nike's corporate strategy.

We realize it's important. You've talked a lot about what got you through these roles from general manager at Nike Vietnam to being Vice President of Sustainable Manufacturing and Sourcing, which connects to five plus years as Chief Sustainability Officer.

So sustainability, it's in the core of Nike's DNA. If you could explain a little bit about how that shows up from the chief sustainability officer seat.

And then particularly because we were talking about focus, one of the things that struck me as I was learning more about your journey is you were very purposeful within your role about leading the acceleration of Nike's materials innovation strategy.

So within the context of sustainability, where does that take us in terms of Nike's exploration around innovation and how that translates to the clothing that we wear and the shoes that we put on our feet?

[00:32:30] Noel Kinder: Sure. That's a great question.

So, when I stepped into the role, I was following Hannah Jones, who had been the Chief Sustainability Officer at Nike for the better part of 15 years and really a pioneer in corporate responsibility and sustainability. So, I had a great foundation to start from.

The role had been restructured a little bit to report to the Chief Operating Officer and so, we had a really specific conversation about what it meant to operationalize sustainability.

Nike had done fantastic work over the years, and really had been considered a leader for 20 years, but as I stepped into the role,what I expressed was a desire to really operationalize it. I felt like I had spent all this time in operations. I wanted it to be real and integrated at an enterprise level.

And so, there were really three or four components that really drove that. And I'll get to the materials innovation piece because it was a really important one.

The first one was, did we have quantifiable targets? Not things that we would do better at, but things that we would say, we will do X by Y by this date. And we were in the process of setting those goals as I stepped into the role. So that train had already left the station, as they said.

The other component that was really important was the organizational structure. When I took over, there was a central sustainability team that reported up to the chief operating officer and I really felt like if we were going to operationalize sustainability, then you had to have leaders embedded in each of the major functions of the company, whether that was advanced innovation as it related to materials, manufacturing, product design, and then things like communications and brand marketing.

And so, we broke the team apart and embedded them in those functions. And that left me with a bit of a virtual team, but it was certainly more effective at driving an integration with the major functions of the companies day-to-day.

And then there were two other components that I felt were really important. Number one, you have to treat it like an operational indicator. We've made these public amendments, whether it was lowering our carbon emissions, reducing the amount of waste, reducing the amount of water consumed in the textile manufacturing process.

So, we had to disaggregate those and make sure that the individual functions of the company that controlled the outcomes in that space actually knew what they needed to do; we reported it up like we would cost, quality, or delivery and we did a pretty good job of that. 

And then, of course, the governance component is super important too. And Nike has had a corporate responsibility function in their board of directors for more than 20 years. And so the combination of all four of those dynamics really established the flywheel, if you will.

But back more specifically to your point about materials innovation, one of the ways that we started to break apart those bigger enterprise aspirations or those quantitative goals was really to say, okay, let's just pick carbon for the moment. Where does the lion's share of the carbon footprint come from?

Well, it's really two things. You have the materials that we use, and by that, I mean the feedstock to the materials, whether it's petroleum that goes into polyester or cotton that goes into cotton fabric.

What are the things that those things often drive 50 percent of the company's carbon footprint?

The other component was the energy that it takes to convert those materials to finished goods.

And so, we knew that we had to have a materials innovation offense to start to find alternatives to those things. 

Now, the challenge is that those materials have been around the industry for 50 years or more, right? So it wasn't as simple as just waving a magic wand and finding alternatives to that. One of the things that was really gratifying to see was that the innovation team really took that to heart.

And for a long time, their mantra had been make athletes better, right? That's what the company was founded on. It was about making athletes better. And [so] they integrated make the planet better for athletes as part of that mantra too. 

So, as they were evaluating things that perform better from a sweat wicking standpoint or an energy return standpoint from a component of a running shoe, sustainability became part of that consideration, which was really important because you're building the pipeline of innovation many, many years ahead of when it will become commercial.

If you can start to think with that notion of integrating sustainability into the calculus, you're doing it in a way that will pay dividends years and years down the road when those things become really big franchises with millions and millions of units.

[00:36:16] Jason Rudman: Well, you know, I'll go out on a limb. So I'm a lapsed marathon runner. I've run on a pair of plant-based Nike shoes at some point or something to that effect. And they work!

What you're talking about is this expansive, almost virtuous cycle as you innovate from a materials perspective.

How do you put materials back into the system, so that you're not having to find new. 

What's your proudest moment as a chief sustainability officer at Nike? What would you say, you know what, we took this on, the future wasn't promised and we had tremendous impact, either on our customers that use our product, our colleagues that make the product, the employees at Nike that represent us every day. 

I know you're looking at me going, you're asking me to pick one. You know, an expression of your proudest moment. 

[00:37:00] Noel Kinder: Anytime I heard the phrase that Nike is widely viewed as a leader in sustainability, that's pretty gratifying. And certainly, I don't take sole credit for that at all. I had a great team. I had a predecessor who worked really, really hard for nearly two decades to build a foundation for that. But that's what you want to hear, right?

And you want to hear that the effort you're driving is being recognized as being a leader.

There are a couple of other ones. The passion that I saw in the employee base, the desire to participate, I would have people come to me regularly and say, Hey, I work in IT or I work in merchandising. I really want to help. What can I do even though I probably won't get a job with sustainability in the title?

And that was just knowing that that momentum, that that energy was there was really, really helpful to know, because, you know, your employees, they're your single biggest asset and especially in the transformational effort, like driving a more sustainable company, you've got to have the employee base on board. 

I'd say the third one is a little hard to quantify and I'll give you kind of two sides of the same coin. When I stepped into the role, the innovation team was working on a product called Space Hippie, which is a great name, but it was a science experiment and it was their initiative to drive the most sustainable, lowest carbon footprint shoe that Nike had ever made.

And they really quickly came up with the theory that it had to be made out of recycled material. That was what was available to them at the time. And you can Google it. It's a really unique looking shoe and we kind of went, eh, it's cool. It'll be a great story. Who knows how many will sell it, but it wound up selling a ton.

It was a really popular shoe. There's four different models within the family. And I remember I took my son to the emergency room one time for something minor and the nurse was there and she was wearing a pair of these space hippies. And I said, Hey, how do you like shoes? 

“Oh, they're so comfortable. I love them. I bought three different pairs of them. So then I wear them out, you know, I've got more” and I thought, okay, yeah, we kind of caught lightning in a bottle on that one.

And again, I don't take any responsibility for that, but that shows you the power of capturing that energy of the employee base and unleashing the creativity of an innovation team.

And that move to zero, which was, you mentioned earlier, was the umbrella for all of the sustainable product at Nike, grew to be a very large percentage of the business. I don't know what the number is, and I don't think the number is public, so I probably shouldn't say it, but..

[00:39:13] Jason Rudman: So no, we don't want to get you into trouble. Let's not do that.

[00:39:16] Noel Kinder: No, but I think being able to see, and that represented two things—it represented evidence of the materials innovation strategy where product teams would take existing products and substitute aligning with recycled polyester, for example, right? So nothing otherworldly, but really had a significant impact on the overall footprint of that shoe. No pun intended! 

It also represented new innovations where teams were creating products that were explicitly made with recycled material that was really kind of overt to the consumer.

So to see that go from zero dollars when I started to a substantial amount when I left, that demonstrated to me how much change we were able to create in a relatively short period of time.

[00:39:57] Jason Rudman: There's a full circle moment in what you talked about. I'm going to pull on a thread.

So, the middle part of what you said was when you were excited about the employees at Nike that would come to you and say, I'm never going to get a role in sustainability, however, I want to be part of this

And then, I go all the way back to where we started where you were I've got this idealistic…I want to be part of sustainability and somebody said yeah, that's great you're going to be in operations or you're going to be in finance.

So, you're creating new careers because you never know, you might inspire somebody to go on a different path.

You mentioned at the top [that] you stepped away from Nike. You find yourself in this moment where you're going to write the next chapter of what you want to do. So what does that look like?

[00:40:44] Noel Kinder: Yeah, that's a great question. And I've obviously thought a lot about it since I stepped away.

You know, I've been really fortunate that I've spent a fair amount of time with a number of venture firms, advising them on investments that they're evaluating, doing a little bit of consulting as well.

And what's been fun about that is, as diverse as my responsibilities were over the course of my career at Nike, you're still in the same corporate ecosystem, right? And so, to be able to see in this early stage companies with these brilliant founders and these fantastic ideas and offer a little bit of my perspective from my experience, has been really, really fun.

And I hope to continue to do that for a while too. I think I will wind up back in a leadership role somewhere. I don't know what that means.

I don't know what it looks like yet, but, I often describe myself from a career standpoint as a mutt meaning that as you said, so many twists and turns from my time in Vietnam to my time in finance, to leading and sustainability. 

I really think that I want to be able to continue to drive positive impact but I think I understand now, more than ever, how important good leadership is and the ability to think beyond just the traditional approach to sustainability or ESG or whatever it may be and how it is a part of growing a business successfully, profitably and with a healthy dose of innovation.

[00:41:57] Jason Rudman: If you were to give our audience a couple of pointers to start learning and thinking are there a couple of areas that you would say, this is on the leading edge of where we've got to go next and start thinking about, and are there particular sources or cohorts of companies that are particularly intriguing to you as you advise and think through this next chapter.

[00:42:19] Noel Kinder: Ah, geez. Yeah. Those are some really profound questions.

You know, I think the leading edge really, there's so many things out there that I've seen through the venture space. that they're really attempting to transform the way the world operates.

And I'll give you one really specific example,l and I think I'm answering two of your questions at the same time.

I had a chance to talk to a woman named Alisha Fredriksson who started a company called Seabound. 

Seabound basically is modular carbon capture for freight vessels. So, think of a forty-foot container that would normally sit on a container vessel that has limestone, which is a pretty common carbon capture technology. The smokestack from the ship is actually routed through the shipping container and extracts a certain amount, not all of the carbon, but a certain amount of the carbon from that exhaust. And then, because it's modular, can be transported off the ship when they go in port, replaced with another one and continue to operate relatively seamlessly.

And I just remember thinking in this conversation, Alisha's brilliant, like what a fantastic idea. It demonstrated to me the possibility of what the world's going to look like. We've had this massive industrial revolution and the impacts of that over the last century and a half or two centuries.

And now we're really looking at it through—like do we continue to stimulate economic growth? To continue to provide opportunities for people to thrive, but do it in a way that's a little more thoughtful and a little less damaging than we've done it in the past.

The human mind is unconstrained, it's capable of some pretty incredible things. And so, when I had a chance to speak to her, saw the technology, I really hope that she's successful and I hope that ten years from now, every ship in the ocean has something like that on board.

[00:43:56] Jason Rudman: Alisha may become a More Elephant podcast. So, Alisha, if you're listening to this, know that this is why we're having a conversation.

What else inspires you in this moment as you think through this next chapter?

[00:44:08] Noel Kinder: You know, I'm really, this is going to sound somewhat silly, but I'm really inspired by the shift in pragmantism or went on sustainability in ESG. 

I think that's a step up the maturity curve for something that's really important, but maybe had been a little fluffy…viewed as a little fluffy in the past.

And I do think, you know, nobody wants to be regulated. No industry wants the oversight of regulation on top of them. But I do think that what you're seeing in places like Europe is going to force a more pragmatic approach to this stuff. 

And I think people will start to ask the question. In fact, I was involved in a conversation last week where the question was, okay, well, we're going to have to do this regulatory compliance regime. We have to do this reporting. How do we drive value from this too? That is the right question.

It's not sustainability for the sake of sustainability. You're still running a business. You're still trying to create value, grow the business, grow your profitability. This can become a catalyst for that. I'm really excited about that. It'll be interesting to see how companies respond to it because not everybody will respond to it positively. No question. But I think there's a tremendous amount of opportunity for sustainability to grow up a little bit.

[00:45:09] Jason Rudman: I think pragmatism is a More Elephant insight, right? Not just in this space but generally, we talked a little bit about what we wish we'd known when we were young and, going at it and trying to solve the world by doing million things all at once. And you realize very quickly that you can't do that.

I think pragmatism as a core More Elephant value and spirit about how you approach things in the world could go a long way.

So how do people get in touch with you, Noel, if they're excited by and want to engage in conversation or find out more about anything that you're interested in?

[00:45:49] Noel Kinder: Hit me up on LinkedIn. That's probably the easiest way to. 

[00:45:52] Jason Rudman: Fantastic. And we'll include that in the show notes.

We started with idealism as part of your origin story. We're going to end with this has been an ideal conversation for me. I really appreciate the time. I have learned a tremendous amount by simply spending an hour with you.

And I think anybody that listens will appreciate that if you put in the work you can drive sustainable, no pun intended, sustainable, durable change. So appreciate your time. Thanks Noel.

[00:46:22] Noel Kinder: My pleasure, Jason. Thanks for having me. 

​​More Elephant Outro