Episode 557: IBM CSO Christina Shim on Turning Sustainability Into a Business Growth Engine

SPEAKER_1 (0:12)

Welcome to a new episode. Today's guest is Christina Shim. She is the Chief Sustainability Officer at IBM. Christina, thanks so much for joining us. Happy to have you here.

Christina Shim (0:21)

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_1 (0:23)

So I want to start broad on our conversation, right? And you have access to energy, access to materials, access to markets. Those things, it's shaping up to be one of the biggest challenges of the current days.

Broadly, again, to start, why do you think that is and why are we running into issues like these right now, all this access issues?

Christina Shim (0:44)

So if I take a step back for a second, I think when I came into the role as our Chief Sustainability Officer, what was really important to me was to make sure that we were thinking about sustainability as part of the business, right? As part of business value fundamentally imbedded in how we think about everything from operations to our products to how we access markets. And increasingly, I think the consensus is that it is something that really fundamentally underlies and is kind of a foundation for how we think about business resilience and growth.

So those three particular areas, energy, access to markets and materials, I don't know that they're necessarily if it's like a new trend right now in the last couple of months, or if it's something that just has always fundamentally been an issue with businesses, it's kind of where businesses always need to focus, right? But there are some changes and trends that have changed the dynamic of how we think about things. When you think about energy, the increased demand for AI, cloud, electrification, even things like semiconductor manufacturing, those are all areas that require much more energy, right? So those are things that, you know, with the changes of technology, with the advance and acceleration of technology, it's increasing demand on those areas.

Access to markets. I mean, this is no surprise to your audience. There's an incredible geopolitical kind of like difficulties in navigation right now. That is not necessarily something that's brand new, but the way that that has changed and the dynamics around geopolitics has fundamentally shifted I think over the last several years. That is something that access to markets, you have to think about the dynamics of more deregulation in certain areas and more regulation in other areas. Then materials as well, it's tied to the geopolitics, but there's a concentration of certain core minerals, materials, things that we really need to start focusing from a supply chain perspective and understand from a national security element, and also from the increase of technology. These are all feeding together that materials and access to materials also fundamentally is changing.

SPEAKER_1 (2:51)

And you spoke at the beginning of your answer to the importance of integration or integrating sustainability into a lot of what IBM does. And on paper, saying that looks great, but it's difficult or of the utmost importance to actually weave it in to the company as a whole. Not necessarily have sustainability as a nice little piece on the side. It's important to really let it have a seat at the table of sorts.

How did you go about doing that when you first came to IBM to make sure that again, sustainability wasn't just a nice little unit to its own, but really a major part of what IBM does?

Christina Shim (3:29)

Yeah, look, it's really difficult to force it on to people, right? But at the end of the day, this can't be something that just the 10 people or the 100 people or 1000 people are passionate about the topic, think about. So how do you meet people where they are? It's a combination for me in two ways. One is language, so how do you make sure that you're communicating it in the right way? So if I'm talking to a CFO, I'm going to talk about it in terms of this is how much money it's saving you, or this is how much growth is happening because of it. If I'm talking to legal, we have to talk about clauses perhaps or, or compliance and regulations. If I'm talking to marketing, it's going to be about the swag. If I'm talking to the business units, it's going to be about how we build the products, whatever it is, right? So you have to make sure you're using the right language. The second though is meet people where they are. So that it does fundamentally tie to language, also there are for any large company, lots of existing processes and workflows. We have these enterprise intelligent workflows that define everything around the company. And so we went through one by one and said, where does it make sense for us to just embed sustainability as part of that workflow?