Sustainability LIVE Chicago Q+A: Sol Salinas, Capgemini

Sol, would you like to tell us a bit about yourself and the job that you have?

Yes, absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me here with my colleagues from Capgemini. We're delighted to be at Sustainability LIVE in Chicago.

I'm an Executive Vice President at Capgemini and I oversee the sustainability work for the Americas, for Capgemini, the group, and I’m also part of the leadership team on sustainability globally.

Could you summarise some of the key points from the session that you've been involved in?

I’d love to. The session that I spoke at was around net positive. We at Capgemini believe that we as a global community need to do more than we're currently doing.

As you may know, Paul Polman and Andrew Winston wrote a book entitled Net Positive and released it, published it in 2021. We have taken that book to heart as Capgemini the group and have been working with Paul and Andrew to operationalise the tenets of the lessons that are contained in that book.

And so my aim here is to have individuals join us in that cause and to introduce a tool that we've developed along with corporate partners that help organisations actually assess their maturity or lack thereof on net positive.

The event that we are staging at the moment is relatively unusual in that it has three different areas all together – procurement, supply chain and sustainability. What do you think are the benefits of that?

As we do our work at Capgemini, we recognise that increasingly we have to engage multiple functions within the enterprise.

The chief sustainability officer role is one that is a convening role in many ways and they have to rely very heavily on their colleagues, whether it's in procurement, whether it's in supply chain, IT, HR, marketing, et cetera.

So the more that we as sustainability practitioners engage with our colleagues in other parts of the enterprise, the better off we'll be and the more likely we are to succeed.

So I welcome opportunities to talk to procurement and supply chain directors about their role in advancing sustainability. It should be part and parcel of everything they do every single day.

You were here at the event yesterday as well, I believe. Do you have any takeaways from it?

I think events like this are indispensable to us as a community.

I always encourage our teams as they sit in the audience, to look to the left and look to the right and make a connection and do the same thing in the next session.

So I think we have to collaborate and we have to put aside any boundaries that we have and perhaps engage with our frenemies, if I could use that term, and recognise that time is in fact running out.

In many respects, I'm the hopeless romantic when it comes to sustainability and we have to have everyone in the room collaborating, eliminating the silos, being as seamless as possible, becoming friends and recognising that the solutions are in the room.

We just have to have that conversation.

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