This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks, and Corey Glickman, Partner, Head of Sustainability & Design at Infosys, a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. Corey is named among the top 100 influential designers of the decade, recognized as one of the top 50 leaders to watch in 2023, and author of the award-winning “Practical Sustainability: Circular Economy, Smarter Spaces, and Happier Humans.” He has 40 years of experience in industry and consulting, providing technology and business leadership experience in strategic design thinking and applied systems design for sustainability solutions. In this episode, Corey defines the crossover between design thinking and sustainability, talks about his career creating experiences through industry defining companies, and discusses the government policy programs of the future.
This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks, and Corey Glickman, Partner, Head of Sustainability & Design at Infosys, a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting.
Corey is named among the top 100 influential designers of the decade, recognized as one of the top 50 leaders to watch in 2023, and author of the award-winning “Practical Sustainability: Circular Economy, Smarter Spaces, and Happier Humans.” He has 40 years of experience in industry and consulting, providing technology and business leadership experience in strategic design thinking and applied systems design for sustainability solutions.
In this episode, Corey defines the crossover between design thinking and sustainability, talks about his career creating experiences through industry defining companies, and discusses the government policy programs of the future.
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Guest Quotes
“Whatever you do in life make sure that, whether you're in a company or whether you're an individual, you do something that matters when the final accounting is done.” - Corey Glickman
“Policy is what makes a difference, right? Ultimately, if you really want to see things happen, and although it could be very bureaucratic and it's government related, You need to do these things in order to drive change.” - Corey Glickman
Episode Timestamps
(02:31) Corey’s role
(04:15) Defining design
(09:53) Corey’s background
(19:23) Creating experiences
(29:34) Defining sustainability
(42:03) Policy programs
(50:30) Lightning round questions
Links
Phil Dillard: Hello and welcome to Thruline to the 4th Sector, where we're exploring fourth sector capitalism and impact investing as an invitation to innovation and changing the world. This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks and Corey Glickman, Partner and Head of Sustainability and Design at Infosys, a global leader in next generation digital services and consulting.
Corey is named one of the top 100 influential designers of the decade, recognized as one of the top 50 leaders to watch in 2023, and author of the award-winning Practical Sustainability: Circular Economy, Smarter Spaces, and Happier Humans. He has 40 years experience in industry and consulting, providing technology and business leadership experience in strategic design thinking and applied systems design for sustainability solutions.
In this episode, Corey defines the crossover between design thinking and sustainability, talks about his career creating experiences through industry defining companies, and discusses the government policy programs of the future.
Now, please enjoy this conversation between Phil Dillard and Corey Glickman.
Phil Dillard: Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of Thruline to the 4th Sector. I'm Phil Dillard, your host here with the amazing Corey Glickman, VP and Global Head of Sustainability and Design at Infosys. How are you doing today, Corey?
[00:01:34] Corey Glickman: I'm doing very well, Phil. How are you doing today?
[00:01:36] Phil Dillard: I'm great. I'm great. Glad to have you with us. It's really good to meet you. You know it's funny, when we had this joke when Corey and I met and he was talking about, I said, where are you? He said, I'm in Pittsburgh. And I did the pause because I'm in San Francisco and he's in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
And when I first moved here, people talked about being in Pittsburgh and I realized that they weren't talking about Pennsylvania. So I had to always ask which one it is. But it's good to have another, uh, Pennsylvania guy on the show and really happy to really get to know you a little
[00:02:04] Corey Glickman: bit. I'm looking forward to this tremendously.
I'm very excited to do this.
[00:02:08] Phil Dillard: Yeah, same. Same. So let's just get started. I mean, we do the show in three segments where we first talk about you and your journey. Then about what is it that changed you in your life that got you into where you are, and then really talking about the work. And the accomplishments and the, the significance of doing what you're doing versus if we weren't doing it at all.
So we can really get into some tougher things. So let me start just with you and your journey. When people ask you what you do, how do
[00:02:37] Corey Glickman: you describe what you do? It's a great question because often it's not a simple answer, but we try to make it very realistic here. So I work for a very large technology company.
And technology is a catalyst for many things, but if you really ask me what do I do, I'm a designer and the type of design that I do is applied systems design, which says, how do you take very complex systems? That could be certainly technology. It could also be a business system. It could be an economic system, it could be a social system, and how do those align?
How do those pieces all work together and understand how to optimize that outcome? That would be. The first thing I do, I think the second thing that I do is I scale things. So I've been an entrepreneur where I've started up several companies and I've started up several units within large companies, which is even more difficult I think, in some cases.
So I'm generally the person they come to to say, we have this idea, it hasn't been done yet. Get it from a zero to one idea. And then how does this thing scale? Where should it be killed off, and how do we make those decisions? So I would say those are really the two things that I do.
[00:03:46] Phil Dillard: Well, those are, uh, really good things to do.
I mean, I think a lot of times, depending on where people come from in their disciplines, when they hear designer, they hear the different things, right? Like coming from undergraduate in engineering and sciences, I think design or I think systems design. I think systems engineering, right? But I think out here in Silicon Valley, when you're thinking about e-commerce or websites, people think design and they think front end design look and feel and that sort of thing.
So how do you tie. The idea of creating and designing a new system with the ways that you've done it, because they're very different to me, it seems doing it as a startup versus doing it inside a corporation. The difference between being an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur, how do you square those challenges?
[00:04:34] Corey Glickman: Sure. Certainly, and I think maybe where to start is, let's define what design is, right? You know, We go in this direction, cuz I would say design, as you said, could have multiple interpretations and. I think what a lot of individuals might think about design may not recognize that it's actually a very scientific process, and we're talking about all kinds of design.
So when I talk about being a trained designer, I literally went to design school that would say, I am designing special effects, or I am designing print, or I'm designing later on. Things that are cyber or web, eventually designing technology and so forth. And that definition of design actually goes back to Ren and Charles Ames.
This kind of like where I, I look at it where they said, how do you assemble pieces? That you could either create or gather, however you get those together and organize those in a specific way to have a desired outcome. I think it's the right way to say this, and often it involved using newer technologies.
So if you're gonna say, back in the 1950s, the newer technologies were what was coming up for World War ii. There was everything from electronics to ideas around what to do with plywood, but also they were known for concepts such as the Power of 10, of how do I understand what's large and what's small they invent.
Did Mathematica. These are designers that we're looking at the world and understanding observation and task analysis and starting to deal with new society and applying how do we deal with technologies? How do we deal with economics and social changes and hopefully make more of the world better, I'd say is the short answer for this.
So when we apply the idea of design to these newer areas of whether we are creating a company from a startup, usually. That would be, and we see this in Silicon Valley a lot, and as I said, I live in Pittsburgh. We have a lot coming out of our universities and our culture over here, it generally starts with a technology to start out with.
Right? You would say there's three things that you would have to make sure that this works. The first is saying, can I come with a solution that is desirable for somebody to have? The second is, is it technically feasible? Right? Will it work and ultimately, is it viable? Is it gonna economically be able to survive?
And when you start this design process to understand these questions, whether it's through now a hackathon, or whether it's through a business model, campus exercise, or going through entrepreneur dis, you know, practices and discussions and lean, what you'll find out quickly is you don't have enough resources or time or money that you plan on having right.
So then what you have to do is you have to rethink that idea and you have to rethink what you have to work with. And what you'll find through the design process is it actually will improve your outcome, right? Cause you really start to have to hone down with the constraints. What will kill the idea are two things.
First off is your technology fails. You're gonna go nowhere, no matter what you say. And most entrepreneurs will say, the very first thing they do is they've invented something in their garage. They have this technology. What's what's going with AI right now? Now that that's available. All of these innovations and ideas are coming through here.
The second one that I think is a major factor is the fact that because you will have cycles of failure and victory as you go through here and you have to look at the resource constraints, the only way that you'll survive the process is the idea has to be strong enough. And if you don't have a strong enough idea, it'll quickly collapse.
Collapse. So, In combination of thinking about when you start up your own company, you take a high amount of risk and you have to get that capital. And you go through probably every 20 asks, you might get one yes through here and, and you go through that cycle and there's ways of, of navigating that, doing something within a company.
There's similar traits, but it's a bit different because when you're working within a large organization, they're already economically viable. They already have a brand. There's already the silos and everything that makes that large or organism or metabolism already work in that state. So starting up something new is a desired outcome of innovation.
But you have to eventually prove it to be a business. And on part of my pathway of where I think I am an expert at this actually is I worked for a very major company. I worked for the older Westinghouse. There's a new Westinghouse now. Cause the older Westinghouse, I was there when they shut the doors there.
But at a general manager level, what you were given worth three year assignments that said you need to create a 500 million business in three years. Because this is a large corporation, or you need to take a 500 million business and break those assets apart if it's not working well and restitute it into something else.
So that kind of training of every three years of having to solve a major business viable problem really hardens you and gives you that decision making power to say, how do I find value? How do I prove that this is business? Because ultimately it is about being business for things to, to go forward.
[00:09:26] Phil Dillard: Sure.
Going from zero to one is one thing, right? But going from 500 to 5 billion is another right? Uh, or said differently inside of an existing corporation, you already have businesses, you have revenue, you have customers, you have lives of business and disruption might be interesting, but it's not necessarily the best thing for all those other constituents and stakeholders that you need to think about as you're trying to build something new.
Sounds like an interesting challenge. How did you first get involved in this?
[00:09:54] Corey Glickman: Yeah, so that's really interesting. And we'll just take it to maybe just a little pre-history and then leading up to emphasis very specifically. So I think we all learn from journeys along the way, right? And we push ourselves hopefully into challenges.
You're not always just, I'm going to be this innovator, uh, or I've got all this power and, and vision. You also have to deal with the environments that you're in, the companies that you work for, and the people that you work with, and they will. Dictate to you what it is that you have to work with and what you have to achieve, right?
And then you also will say what kind of leader you are or what kind of team player or, or what kind of disruptor you are, and you have to figure out that balance coming across there. So, I think that's part of it. My very first early point where I think I started to self recognize is actually I worked for a nonprofit.
I worked for public television as a designer. Previous to that, I had been, um, taking classes at Princeton and theoretical physics of all things, working on reactors at a very, very early um, age. I actually got to do it while I was in high school. Got advanced to go there. And one of my, uh, mentors there had said, you need to go to design school to tie them, get your thinking together.
And there were certain aspects that were happening at that point. And I ended up going ultimately to a public television station. It was one of my first jobs due there. And I had been there for about eight years. And during that period, I went from the low person on the totem pole to actually running the design department.
And what was not just interesting about the fact of. You're getting design television programs or you're designing campaigns, you suddenly start to realize how do these things get funded? How do these organizations serve the public? How do you work with other creative and technical folks? So it was an early, you know, awareness and it was at the perfect timing where I'm so old that, uh, CD rom games were just starting to be inventive, right?
So it was like, well, what's gaming? And let's, can we do a game? And then some of the program that we did just by, The fact what we were working on was for National Geographic or solving a problem of geography. We created the concept of where in the world is Carmen San Diego as a way of teaching through here.
So you start to learn how do you get public money, how do you create values of product and how do you measure, you know, impact to society and what goes along that way. Um, it will be mentors, which I'll talk about in a minute. And then I'd say, you know, the next stop that I would call out would be starting my first internet company back in 19.
88, I believe Mark Andreessen underwrote me, and we had part of the mosaic contracts who look at how to build the internet. So a lot of understanding the technology aspect, but not understanding venture capital at all. I think nobody knew how to ask for this at that point, right? So a lot to learn in that direction, and that worked and failed after three years.
And we built products along the way in order to feed our habit of doing what we were supposed to do to build Mosaic. We ended up creating, uh, the first GPS systems for, and built MapQuest as a side product and brilliantly sold that for the swapping sum of $60,000. Did not know what we had at the time because nobody knew what to do with those stuff.
It was like, Hey, it took six weeks to build. This is what we do. Right? So, Lessons to learn as you go through there. And that was important too, because it was starting to understand the beginning of something. And these are lessons that have helped me today. And then the next part, I'll go jump into Westinghouse looking at the idea of these large corporations that actually had matter impact, right?
So if you say there, you know, One of my moments that I remember most at Westinghouse, I had the role of, uh, chief Creative Officer there in business development. And there was a very famous predecessor of mine called Paul Rand back in the fifties who was very famous for brand and design. And kind of goes back to the Ames story.
And I remember opening up his desk and finding this handwritten note that he had that he'd look at every morning. I was told by oral history, but I said, what's this note cuz this is his handwriting and he's a very famous guy. And it said, Why Westinghouse is one of the few companies on the planet that matters.
We make nuclear power, we make nuclear weapons, we make colored TV sets. We do so many things that impact how we live, and that was a lesson that I always looked at saying that whatever you do in life, make sure that whether you're in a company or whether you're an individual, you do something that matters when the final accounting is done.
So that was important for me to understand. I also saw why that company eventually, Could not make the survival at that point of they had a change of history, but they're back again for other reasons. And I went into consulting after that because for myself, what I learned is I liked working in large programs.
I felt that even though doing some startups, there's certainly attractiveness of. Making money, um, creating a new technology, uh, being part of that crowd, I realized what I really liked to solve was large problems and new things at scale. And I could do that perhaps better within a larger organization that had many assets or had the ability to follow through.
Right. And. It wasn't as important to me to say sell off something as it was to be part of something. And that's just a personal choice, that there's no wrong decision either way. I then went into consulting because when these large corporations started to change and the idea of technology really started to accelerate, it started to go into the idea of consultancies and especially IT consultancies that said they could do the large projects and they would have larger impact, and that was something during the.com.
Learned a lot of lessons during that, that anybody who had 10 million, somebody was willing to build you something. Right. And it really accelerated this whole idea of e-commerce and what that all meant through there. And then probably what was most impactful for me was, um, I think for many of us was nine 11.
When nine 11 happened, I think it caused a lot of us to think both about ourselves, society, economically. Cause a lot of jobs were lost at that point. And I had a lot of government contacts, uh, historically. And I was asked actually to come into the Pentagon personally. And for three years I worked on the Pentagon rebuild.
To rethink what had happened to that building and what would not happen again, per se. So it really put me on the inside and it helped me understand even further about government and how does the government operate and how do you actually take technologies that get put across there. Then I'll just accelerate.
So today at Emphasis, when I was first brought on board, it wasn't in this role, it was a role to create a design centered consultancy. That was the CEO's idea to say. What kind of projects that didn't seem a lot of business sense, but could possibly be used to find new venues for the company. I remember sitting at this board with him when we did the interview and he said, and he drew a little planet and he drew a big planet.
He drew a rocket ship between the two and he said, see this little planet here? This is what we do right now as company. This is everything that we do. Here's this big planet over here. These are things that we wanna do. And he said, see this rocket ship. This is you. I want you take a group of people and go between these two and do things we, that's not even on the map just yet.
It was definitely a zero to one play. And to be able to look at this, and it was very much, uh, it was in Palo Alto and it definitely had that vibe coming across there. That was the first program that I'd started. It took me a couple times to get it right, but eventually it became a unit within emphasis.
I'd scaled it and then, During that process, one of the things that we had looked at was smart spaces. We as a company, do quite a bit in designing buildings, tech cities, for ourselves and now for others, and they have to be very resource centric and we'll talk about sustainability that we actually.
Looked at it since 2008 that said, how do we build, you know, in areas that don't have high amount of certain kinds of resources, but in excess in others. So low amount of resources would be not a lot of water, not a lot of dependable electricity, but a high amount of human capital. Lots of engineers, lot of brilliant people, and a lot of social drive to do things.
And I incubated that into a second practice. So that became a whole nother business line across there. And as a result of those two activities, which was my first six years at the company, I was then asked to take on sustainability as to say, okay, these are started up. Let's do this again. Let's look at what does sustainability mean to clients, and how do we start to look at this practice?
And that's really how I arrived, you know, to the point that I am at this point.
[00:18:18] Phil Dillard: Thank you so much for sharing that. It's really helpful and I think for people who think that they're going to see a lot of change in their careers, seeing the path that you took and the different steps you took to get to what is an important role in a company that has a lot of influence and reach, they could kind of learn a lot from the different places that you've been and the different things that you've done.
So I really, I really appreciate that. I, I think, um, all the things we read about, Talk about how the younger generations have to be prepared to have multiple career shifts, and they often ignore that. There are people who, who have already tried that path and, and I think your story really helps us put into context as how some folks can think about it, especially going back and forth between like something, um, Startup and entrepreneurial versus something, uh, corporate and one not having to be less than the other, uh, or separate from the other.
I think, oh, the other thing I heard in here is, you know, multidisciplinary communications and storytelling, technology driven, uh, Solving scalable problems, learning how funding and communications and all of this kind of works together, how do you today pull all of that together to create an experience for the clients or partners that you're working with in the work you're doing today?
[00:19:32] Corey Glickman: No, certainly that, that is a great question and it's absolutely vital, right? So in some ways the metaphor would be could you do a pencil sketch of an idea? And sell a million dollars with it, right? Basically, that's the simplified version of this. So when you work within a larger organization, You have many tools in place and you have silos, for instance, how a company is organized.
And a lot of people look at silos, just to be clear. So what a silo is, is that a specific group of individuals or people that run a business line. And so for instance, synthesis has 19. Different silos, right? Whether it could be healthcare, whether it could be financial services. This we also have what we're called horizontals, which could be it, or it could be advisory or it could be, uh, testing that are just universal across there.
And they are all designed in a way so that they can function under their own PNLs, because this is how you create career path. This is how you create excellence and. How operations work. And it also works that it keeps the costs low, right? So that it becomes affordable and accessible. And often you'll hear from the outside, inside that, oh, silos are terrible because they don't let us work together in proper ways.
But they're absolutely necessary once you get to a certain size scale or it doesn't become economically feasible for companies. So having said the process, so how does it work? If we think of the good to great model. We're, we think of something as zero to one, where, okay, we're taking an idea and we're trying to prove it out, and we put certain measurements, there's this zero to one, and we timebox it across there.
And then the next question is we go, how do I go from one to a proof of one, something slightly larger? So tech bring the technology into place that I do a proof of concept across there. And after that point you say, well, how do I go from one to a hundred? And then how do I go to a hundred to a billion across there?
And I go different parts of scale. And what's important? I think to realize, especially for entrepreneurs that might be on a smaller scale of startup, and also for large scale points, you actually have to look at where the actual money is and maybe remove your ego a little bit out of this. Zero to one is very exciting, right?
I'm going to invent something, and it's super important, very little money to be made there, right? To be quite honest, owning that idea is certainly important, but the development of that idea, you might get, the very best company, I could say could be I D O, for instance, right? They might make a million dollars for that zero to one experience and being the very best for, for most people it's $30,000 to maybe a half a million dollars.
You might see in that phase going from a one to a, um, to a prototype kind of level, that tends to be, uh, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars at best that you're ever gonna see to go build a prototype. And it has to be done in six to eight weeks. More likely you're still under a hundred thousand dollars.
It's going from the one to the 100. And getting up the vigor is where the real value happens. Not just from making money, which runs those companies, but it's truly where the scale takes place. So you'll find specialist companies, like you'd say, who's the best to do a prototype. It's probably, or the strategy, it's probably quarter Mackenzie or a Bain and someone that's going to, you know, plot this out and say, this is.
How you're gonna have a successful business. When you get to an emphasis level, traditionally it would've been saying, okay, well now that this thing exists, how do I scale this and how do I get this at a certain cost point? But where that has changed over the last, um, I'd say 10 years, honestly, would be the fact that so much has been data driven on the backend.
When you have work for a complex emphasis, because we run so many of the IT systems and we run the cloud services and we know all the data and we're doing all the IT components and we're doing the advisory, the data itself is where all the value is because it tells you what's happening and that becomes your strategic leader.
So it's kind of flipping the model around. So having said that, Working for a complex emphasis, you have all of these different areas that you should have around you that you can use to sell an idea or to start something up or to be able to deliver across there. So it's a combination of taking advantage of those tools and those phases and how to work within there.
It's also understanding that we have 6,000 engagements. At any point during the year globally, most of 'em are fairly large, but you know, very few of 'em are under a couple hundred thousand dollars, but most of 'em are in the millions. And because you see that wide swath, you have to understand how do you work with the people around you?
How does sales work? How does advisory work? How do you do good economics? How do you do good design? How do you make sure it's user centric? How do you make those decisions? Ultimately, that is. Right. For the client, right? For the client's client across there. And when it comes to sustainability, it's a complex thing, right?
Because it's something new that's both compliance. They have to start doing this, but they also have made the switch to say it's no longer just compliance, it's an economic driver. So there's, there's a lot of dynamics that takes place in there.
[00:24:29] Phil Dillard: Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting because I think the conversation you're sharing is, to me, one that's brain stretching.
If you're spending a lot of time looking at companies to go from zero to one or you know, or one to a hundred, right? Because people are saying, we gotta be doing things with cutting edge technologies that are addressing some of these big challenges and getting innovations out the door and expecting lots of them to fail and that sort of thing.
And that's, if you're in this. Fast moving entrepreneurial space, but if you're in a space where I hear you said your organization drives value by scaling something big, right? Creating something of real value. And when you have thousands of projects going on around the world of sizes that one of these companies would love.
To have for a quarter or for a year. It helps to showcase how challenging the sustainability questions might be and the policy engagements too. And I wanna get into that, but before we do, just ask a quick question. I mean, if you're one of those zero to 100 phase companies, what sort of partnerships do you seek with those companies?
How do you engage with them? Are all your things internal versus external, or is there a space for them to engage with a company like emphasis?
[00:25:40] Corey Glickman: Well, first of all, there's absolutely a space, and there always has been. I think ever since the idea of digital transformation, there's been a space because large companies have trouble innovating.
They just do, and I will say that publicly because the idea of sustaining an innovation is a financial. Obligation. It's a cost center, right? It says, ultimately, as I have to make budget decisions of where do people work or what projects I choose to work on, there's certainly a place for innovation, but it's never held at the same level of saying a very billable, large, intensive, you know, event.
So where do large companies find innovation? They will work with an ecosystem of partners, large and small, that are specialists in those areas, and we provide this scale that says, Together we can provide maybe the technology that you may not have the means to acquire or perhaps see through there.
Perhaps there's certain business levels across or, or there's access to clients or to funds, and we have mechanisms for this. The other aspect that I think is unique to Emphasis, which I. The reason why I came over, because up until instance, I only worked for, say, Western based companies. I was extremely attracted to working in the Southern globe, the Southern Hemisphere, and diversity and culture, and we are all seeing the impact right now of this, right?
This is where the future is and it continues to be so. So it. Tells me that no matter how long you've worked at something, you should always look for another challenge. So this idea of entrepreneurs reaching out and where their place is, it's absolutely necessary. And I think it's gonna become even more so as we see things like SVB Bank closing down, and maybe that's one of the doors that is shutting.
Doesn't mean the work goes away. Or the opportunity this away, it just means the funding comes from somewhere else. So it's much more likely you're going to see it through a relationship with a large company or with a government entity. And we could talk about that. We talked about our pre-talk about some of the programs that I'm working with in those areas.
So how do they work with us? We set up foundations. We have individual networks and individuals that we know. Our clients themselves will say, we've heard about these companies, or we're looking for specific technologies. We have a network of 125 universities. That we work with that keeps us attuned of what is out there and who's out there.
We work with incubators. It's really part of our portfolio also.
[00:27:58] Phil Dillard: Awesome. It's really helpful. Cause I mean, I think a lot of times people put a broad brush around corporations and they're like, corporations are bad. And they don't necessarily look at, say, what are some of the. The opportunities you have from partnering with corporations and what they could do, and I think actually in this environment, particularly for the mission driven entrepreneur, for the Climate Tech entrepreneur partnership with corporate innovation, corporate venture, um, with corporate business units.
That know that they have a mandate for doing things differently, that they would like to have that innovation muscle, the energy, the drive and such that some of these companies can bring and they can actually be really good partners right now, actually, possibly even better than the venture capitalists that we're seeing who might offer, who might.
Proposed to offer the same sort of support because of the money and the duration and, and the type of things. And I know we want to get into this, so I'm gonna try and propose this two ways. First, we can go back into definition mode and we'll go into the definitions of the different terms that we need to talk about.
And then, you know, we could talk about the roles of profit and capitalism, government and nonprofit and NGO partnerships and things like that so we can execute them. So let's start first with the definition. How would you define. Sustainability and then describe the difference between like sustainability and regeneration.
Great
[00:29:17] Corey Glickman: question. We often assume that everybody knows what those mean when we talk about sustainability. Once again, I, I like to use metaphors as the first point. I'd say it's living within a budget is the way I look at it, saying there just aren't unlimited resources, so how do I understand that? And also move things forward across there.
I think the common definition that people think about sustainability is hopefully is less waste coming out of. A result. You know, I'm using resources that are not infinite, right in everything that we do here. So how am I smarter about my resources and then hopefully I have less waste coming out? You know, ending up in a landfill is a basics definition when we look at the idea of resiliency, is the way I would say it.
Is, how does both the delivery of those services, whether it's business, whether it's government, whether it's society, make those changes and weather the storms, literally weather the storms of, of what's taking place have changed and being able to move forward and hopefully not take steps backwards and hopefully do this in a just transition fashion that says it's not.
A mode that just says, keep things as they are. And, and what I mean by that is the people who currently people are companies or governments and nobody I'm saying is evil in a statement, people like to hold onto power. They like to hold onto deposition and they all have this desire to grow across there.
It's very difficult if you're not one of those leaders to break into that circle. So just transition is really how do more society actually get access and bring that diversity and innovation coming across there. And a great example would be, uh, Education. So it would be great to say everybody could have their masters from a leading school and get that six year degree and even more than that.
But let's say six year degree is enough. What could prevent that? Could be maybe geographically where you are. It could be your economic status. Maybe two years of school is good enough. Maybe, you know, there are other mechanisms through there. So, The fact is, is that there has to be this ability for a just transition.
That as things change, we get a wider part of society being productive in this area. And ultimately the goals. People live longer, they have better lives, we move forward, right? And hopefully it's science based, I would hope. But also it's of course, it's culturally there. So to me those are resiliencies because just having that solution that doesn't account for that, We'll be, we're trying to hold onto the past and making that past extend, and that'll work for some, but it will not bring the change that's gonna be necessary.
Let's
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And now back to the interview.
I am really glad you said that cuz there's a whole lot of nuance in there and it's also helpful coming from a guy who's leading corporate sustainability on these, you know, sort of 6,000 global projects that we're talking about because people need to understand that there are people who are. Thinking this way, who have the understanding of the context and are working to try and a address this issue, right?
Yes. If resilience is how you weather the storm and sustainability is living within the budget, there's still, how do I recover from the storm, right? How do I grow my budget? How do I live better, but in a way that, uh, doesn't live without the reality that there's a constraint on the size of the planet and the number of resources, right?
So we have to change the way we're thinking about. Addressing those resources, distributing those resources. It's an integrative thinking says the pie gets bigger and the pie gets bigger in a number of different known and unknown dimensions. And it doesn't mean that anyone necessarily has to suffer. A loss for others to have a gain.
And that stretches people's brains in a, in a lot of different ways, especially when some people are just thinking, how do I make this community resilient to climate change, to big storms, to ocean acidification? So it is a multivariate complex problem. That kind of actually leads me to the next question, because I think this is where corporations first start to engage in this.
How do you describe the difference between E s G and impact?
[00:34:27] Corey Glickman: Sure, certainly. So I think E S G will have two definition components of it for a corporation. So at the first level, it'll be financial value, right? So the first thing that is looked at saying, why would I invest in E S G activities, what does it do to my investment portfolio?
So we did a report recently in 2023 called E S G Radar that specifically looked at that question of why is the C-suite now looking, how are they looking at this? And we interviewed over 2,500 CEOs during this point and we said, so why is e s G of interest to you and why are you putting the resource there and why are you reporting on this?
And. If I asked this question three or four years ago, they would've partially been for some folks, they would've said it's compliance. We're being asked to look at this. Um, across there, however, there were. True leaders, I'd say in the investment field like BlackRock and others that have been talking E S G for a while, saying, this is where the money is, right?
This is the future of the economy and investment portfolios need to look at this. So that first stage really was about what does it do to an investment portfolio. Now at the corporate level, there's a big difference between just looking at how this affects the value of a company and of your portfolio to saying, am I using technology for good?
Am I. Choosing decisions about my value chains of the kind of people that I work with, my partners and my ecosystems that have. Either shared values that we think are responsible or bring additional diversity across there. So then you start to get into the S and the G components that says, you know, one way, for instance, that a company that might look at sustainability could say, well, I'm going towards a net neutral status, and we are at a net neutral status.
As an example, I'll dive into this, that no company could truly be net neutral carbon, right? It's practically impossible. I don't even know if it's, it's feasible. So we have this mechanism in place that says, All right. We will design assets as efficiently as possible. We will use renewable energy sources and make power purchase agreements, and then we have leftover and then.
Leftovers. You use carbon credits, right? And those can be purchased. They can be built. They can be created. Or you can do things such as CSR kind of programs. And so for emphasis, we went ahead and we said for ourselves, we have all these buildings that we design. We create tech cities, and we can create the assets.
We have engineers and we have business leaders and so forth. Let's do that. And we can build energy fields. We know how to build 60 megawatt energy fields, and we have partners like BP and others that can build this with us. We know how to build robotics that can actually monitor these fields, and we can actually do generative AI that can predict weather and look for anomalies.
And this gets us to a, a very important point of energy and water and waste and where we wanna be. And then there's CSR programs that we said. This is how we're going to, we're going to improve the economic creation around us and make society through us. And this will be the balance of what we'll go with through here.
So corporations actually want to do this for good, but there's also a very practical business reason if you purchase carbon credits, if you rely on that marketplace. The way this works is an organization has to determine how much is a metric ton of carbon worth, and that's, that's the price of carbon.
And then you have to have enough offsets to. Get you towards that path. That's a fluctuating market on a daily basis. And it's constantly regulated and will continue to be so very hard to be the C F O of a company in saying, this is what my budget's gonna be and how I'm gonna be audited, if that's a fluctuating, unstable component.
So it's difficult to go with, if you have a CSR program, you can actually lock in what your price is and you know it's not gonna fluctuate. Now the reality is it's difficult to do these. For most companies, they can make part of their portfolio in that direction. And for ourselves, we do this because we don't wanna quote, be held hostage to say, we're not having a great quarter, let's put more carbon pieces on the market and get more credit.
But for companies that we work with, we do develop carbon. Sustainable financing components because without that, there's no way that these programs ever get funded. I'd kind of like to kind of go back to a point that you talked before, just to be very clear about how emphasis thinks about this and how I personally think about this.
We talk about innovation. Not all innovations are about zero to one. Innovation could also be very much so about taking tried intrude policies and technologies and activating those and actually making those function. That's as big an innovation as anything else. Right? So when I took this position a couple years ago, Took the position.
I was saying, you need to go do this. I was like, well, I don't have a choice. I'm gonna go do this through here. First thing I decided to do is how do I know what exists and how do I know if our company is aligned and how do I know if my partners are aligned? So I was able to work an arrangement with emphasis that said, I wanna write a book.
And I wanna write a book about practical sustainability. I wanna understand what frameworks are out there, where things are heading, what would be good for an executive, what would be good for a tech level individual, and what would be good for say, government and create a narrative, not a deep research book.
Cause that would take eight years to write, and by then it's too late. Lost a game. I actually designed that book along with my co-writer from Emphasis, uh, Jeff Kavanaugh of The Knowledge Institute, and we said, first rule, it can be read by any executive in two long airplane rides. That was the first thing I said.
It's gotta be that, be able to be digested there and it has hit certain subjects. And what was interesting about the book is we also said, okay, what are we gonna focus on? We said, well, we know a lot about smart spaces and buildings, and that accounts for 40% of the greenhouse gas is the built environment.
So that's, that's a big tackle. So let's do that. We know that quite well. Second, when we said circular commerce, Because that's how things run. And then we said the human component. So happier humans, what's right for individuals. We wrote this book, Al lots of scientific proof behind it, good narratives. But the deal that I made with an emphasis saying it just isn't emphasis stories, it has to be open sourced.
And we went ahead and created this and it's actually done very well, which I'm pleased to say both within schools and within businesses and within the government. It's being used by all three, but. We wrote this book and we said, guess what? There's 65 frameworks that we felt comfortable saying, these are things you can do right now, and here's the impact and here's the proof of what you can do.
And then there's also ways of doing responsible r and d. So the idea of tried and true technology is extremely important, scary part. What happened was about three weeks into the book release, um, a prominent economist came to us and said, so you're telling me that you can solve for 50% of everybody's sustainability agenda that they're trying to tackle within five years and give them a return on investment within one to three years?
And I looked at Jeff and I said, We never wrote that sentence in there. Did we actually say that? So, uh, went back to, um, several other economists in some schools said, please check our work. And it actually was 62% that they validated there is. So this idea of tried and true technologies won't get you a hundred percent there, but it'll get you 50% of the way there.
And that will convince Fords, and that will really help accelerate, especially in hard economic times. You still have to have innovation and responsible r and d come across there. But I also do a lot of work with say, the West and the G seven. So I'm on the taskforce lead for Sustainable Cities Alliances.
And if you look at the West's. Idea and C 40 s and, um, the Department of Energy, what they are looking for is the stability that says policies can be created and not just for a city, but can be spread across many cities. And although they have to be contextualized, so they also wanna look for proven things.
And this is where public and private partnerships work, where a private entrepreneur might provide the innovation, but the public entity will provide the scale. Because there's lots of money out there. You just have to convince they're spending it in the right place.
[00:42:15] Phil Dillard: And that's one of the things I wanted to definitely make sure that we, we touched on, right?
Because when I hear from you in the book, and particularly around the frameworks, um, and I combine that with what I hear in the investing community, lots of folks. In impact investing, say there's too much money chasing too few good projects, right? And the entrepreneurs are saying, we need to get out there and we need to do these things and we need to build new, new solutions.
And sometimes building some new technology to solve some new and novel problem is important. Sometimes convening people. To, um, identify technologies that they can apply and be effective project managers and rolling out and executing on the projects that need to get done because they need to get done.
They could take something off the shelf and they can, they could build that. And I think that's an opportunity for incubation programs, um, if you're thinking about it in the academic environment or nonprofit testing of things out there. But you spoke specifically about a policy program too that I think is important.
Do you wanna share
[00:43:15] Corey Glickman: that one of the. Areas that I would encourage everybody to think about is what you do within your day job. Discuss way I put it. You have, you know, various KPIs and things you do, and then when you are fortunate to have a role and everybody can have this role around sustainability and E S G and impact just come across here, you have to.
I wouldn't say break rules, but you need to ask for exceptions that say you need to get involved in things. So hopefully you work for the right kind of organization or you have hopefully the personality or the confidence to go take on these additional challenges. So for myself, I took on roles at the WEF and I continued to do so, and this is what I spend my Sundays on and other people around me do this that says I want to be involved in policy.
And although that it's a complex area, we realize that policy is what makes a difference. Right. Ultimately, if you really want to see things happen, and although it can be very bureaucratic and it's government related, You need to do these things in order to drive change. That's one way of doing it.
There's other venues I'm also involved with, uh, the US government, uh, we talked about a little bit earlier on something called cradle commerce program. And what this is, we've all heard about all the government money out their chips program, the Aria, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act and, and several others.
So, How does that money get distributed? How do you actually access it if you're not Lockheed Martin? Right. Or one of the traditional recipients of these large contracts and what the administration and led by Department of Energy and actually Department of Defense and some other entities basically said the event of looking at climate.
Technologies, we'll put that as a thing. There is as big as an event as defining G P s or inventing the internet. And now I kind of understand why they were interested in having me come involved because I kind of related, Hey, guess what? I worked on some of the early in GPS programs for the Navy. I worked with the early internet components and it's that kind of magnitude program that we're talking about.
And we also know it's very, very complex for entrepreneurs and others to access funds or even navigate how, how do you get involved in these? So what they've set up is this very cool program that's led out of Berkeley Labs. Florence Berkeley Labs right up about where you are is they said, let's take the four national labs, because all sustainability is based off of science ultimately, right?
You have to have true scientific fact to do these solutions across here and there's a heavy technology involvement through here. So we said we have great national labs. Foremost important or prominent. One out of the 17 is the Berkeley Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the Idaho lab, which does nuclear technologies, the lab in Tennessee Valley, which does a lot around sustainability and residents, and then argon National Labs with chemistry, and let's combine those resources and make those available to entrepreneurs with guidance.
You could write a proposal. If it's accepted, guess what? You get used to the labs. No cost. You get used to the labs, your projects gets all the value of these universities and what the government can provide. And then we said, the second part was saying, how do people get the right venture? How do they access government funds in a more accessible way?
So we've set up two incubator funds that says, we teach you how to do this. And we will get you access to those funds. And then the third part is deciding is your program strong enough that it can actually scale to both the national and global level? And that's the area that I focus on. It's the link to science saying, if you have a great project that has actually made it to a prototype, how do you take that prototype and get it to scale globally and become that next big wave of climate change?
And. Understanding policy, understanding how to get those funds, understanding how to navigate the government component, but most importantly, how to successfully do this in the least painful way is really, really valuable and important. So getting involved in those kinds of programs, and there's many others, Europe has, its, uh, the Earth Shop program, for instance, the equivalent.
It's lots of money out there, but it's how to access it and how to win is really important. Accessing it
[00:47:06] Phil Dillard: is a big part. Just knowing that they exist is a big part. I mean, people often talk about how government. Is required to be part of the solution, but we also know that government moves at government speed.
You know, the first thought people say is, well wait a minute. I don't wanna run for office. I don't want to be the mayor or governor. I don't even know if I can be good at that. Right? But, Being on a board of something with the World Economic Forum or volunteering some time with that organization or supporting a com company with Cradle to Commerce.
That might be a way that different folks could explore their own path, whether it's in their part-time at their job, or whether it's full-time starting new, or you know, you got laid off from a tech company, whichever. There's lots of different opportunities for people to engage and make those.
[00:47:50] Corey Glickman: No, absolutely.
And I think even more so than today, cuz these organizations, there are certain. Entries to the club, to be quite honest. You know, if you're a large corporation, but many of the individuals that you find working find a way to get into these organizations. I think what's fascinating about today's, uh, scenario, and I literally mean today's scenario, is we are at a point that's a little bit repetitive in history to me, and this has to do with the whole idea of chat, G p t and generative ai.
And, and, and lemme rate the connection here. If you spin back the clock 120 years ago when electricity was first coming around and this idea, if you were to be a great coder or an innovator, it meant how quickly could you teletype? It's basically that that was the, the big invention, right, of being able to send messages, you know, over the wires through here, and those were the leading things.
And you had two kinds of individuals. You had individuals that were truly understood electricity in science like Maxwell and Oliver Heavyside and other folks. But then you had many individuals who were just great ideas and inventors that said, If I understand enough of a principle, I could invent a radio or I could invent some neat innovation that becomes a big part across there.
And what happened, um, 120 years ago is if you first wanted to do this, if you tried to fill up, use Electrodynamics, you'd ha say, wow, I've gotta be a physicist, or I have to understand this new science. And then you had other individuals that said, I can simplify these into sets of formulas that become more commonly used so that you don't have to, the science will work.
But I can be freed up to do this. And it's much like the printing press in some ways. It says, guess what? Books are now available. Everybody can read. It's just not those who can afford to get it. I think with generative ai, we're in a similar situation. You don't have to be a deep technologist, right? In order to create a technology product or perhaps do a great business plan or make the connection to, that's going to solve for something because you now have.
Enough automation around you that you'll find a greater diversity, um, happening of who can actually look at a problem, solve a problem, and bring value across there. And I would look at, at it really from three, um, three ideas. Um, one is, I think. Around sustainability and sg, the first rule is what can I do to decarbonize?
And there's many definitions, but let's just say decarbonize. The second would be saying, how do I democratize? How do I have more people participate? And this frees us up, right? This becomes a leveler. Right of the field that says who can actually do this? And the third is digitalize. It's the technology behind it, which enables that, both of those other two.
And that's why technology is always going to be with us no matter what. Right? It's what drives us. But I think that's why it's a very, very interesting time at this point.
[00:50:24] Phil Dillard: Yeah, the emergence of generative AI and solutions like the decentralized, autonomous organization, you know, the, the growth of the Dow, I mean, they can create such incredible new governance structures or empower people.
It seems like now, why now is a critical time for lots of people. Globally to understand the potential and the capabilities of all these technologies and to more than not be afraid of them, but to lean into them to figure out how they can use them to enhance their own human performance and the realization of their, their goals and dreams.
[00:50:56] Corey Glickman: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, you know, I think like the bottom line is that there's very few barriers to many people if the access remains there. The warning signal for me is not whether it's good or bad, it's just saying who has the advantage? Well, it's the people who own the large hyperscaler companies and other entities that have.
The huge running advantage and they're going to try to keep their advantage. Wow. Yeah. And
[00:51:18] Phil Dillard: potentially, right, and this is the potential of the technology. The technology can be leveling if enough people understand how it can help them level the playing field and how they can be an effective David to a Goliath.
[00:51:28] Corey Glickman: That is absolutely the right metaphor, I would say. And that's the heroism that is based on all our cultures. It doesn't matter, you know, what culture you come from, the David Goliath story runs through through every culture. And so all our beliefs are based also. Right? Yeah.
[00:51:41] Phil Dillard: Yeah. Yeah. And people, they just need to know that it's possible, so, which is awesome and awesome.
A segue to the lightning round. Question number one, 10 years from now, what does success look like to you? And if you can't guess, 10. Cuz that seems like forever, but maybe
[00:51:55] Corey Glickman: five. Yeah, that is forever. But yeah, I thought about this one here. So it's three points to me. One is the things that we do have a net positive environmental impact.
It offsets the energy, resources, and time utilized to create it. That would be my first desire. The second I think, would be that. Everything we do brings an added value to the quality of life in the community. And the third one is that whatever we do ultimately increases capacity for productivity and it continues to ignite economic prosperity and the communities that operates in that's made success.
Super.
[00:52:27] Phil Dillard: Yeah. I think there's no law that says we can't. Live a with a high quality of life with the access to nature and fulfilling ourselves in our society. There's nothing that necessarily says we can't do that. Right. Super. Alright, question two. Outside of your company, is there a project or program or campaign or creation that inspires you outside of your company or day-to-day?
[00:52:48] Corey Glickman: Absolutely right now. Um, so love the cradle, the commerce, uh, program. So the lending answers this. So right now I'm working with the African Union on redefining what is a green industrial city and how to create industrial corridors. So how to tie Europe. And the supply chain to the fact that we're, most of the population is gonna grow by 30%, 40%.
It's gonna happen in Africa. It's where most of the new cities are gonna be created. How do we change in, adjust, transition way and not just create new ways of steel or the mining activities in adjust transition, but also how do you create the economy, the education and the use of this super exciting program that I'm working on the side.
That's super
[00:53:30] Phil Dillard: cool and great things about the African Union. I think they're getting so smart so fast. It's pretty awesome. Okay, third question. What are the most important thing individuals can do to lead to a better future?
[00:53:41] Corey Glickman: I think the most important thing that individuals can do is not just to focus on what they can say, develop or invent or distribute, but also get involved in the community.
Once again, my my own example, so I do a lot through. The kind of activities like, and I find those right, they don't come to you, you find it. But I also make sure I stay involved in my community and it may not have anything to do with my job. So for instance, my secret ambition or what I do is I actually belong to the Pittsburgh Mandolin Orchestra.
It's one of the things that I did during covid. I learned to play the mandolin. I joined the orchestra that was 109 years old. It's crazy, right? It's 40 people who play the mandolin, and we give concerts and we get together every Monday and we do formal rehearsals. We never talk about business. And I'd have to say, no matter what I do in business, I never get the exact value of giving back to community is when I give concert with 40 other individuals who are basically coming outta their walks of life.
So whatever you do in that community, I think it's just as important. It's just not about business and your job, it's about your family and it's about your community, I think's extremely
[00:54:44] Phil Dillard: important. That's a great way to, to remind people to be grounded. It's probably pings on that increased quality of life in a different direction.
Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. That's super cool. I never heard of a mandolin orchestra before. All right, last question. What's the most important thing that governments and NGOs can do to lead to a better future?
[00:55:03] Corey Glickman: Yeah, so that's great. And I think the first thing is that I assume that all governments are trying to do the best they can for the people that they serve.
And that's a statement that I'll just say, and I won't debate. Good or bad about it, but what governments ultimately should hopefully represent is. Longevity of life, higher quality of of living folks, but also recognizing that the importance of public and private partnerships are there. So if we just very quickly think of like, where are we with space flight right now?
That would've been assumed, you know, 40, 50 years from now, only a government could. Deliver a program like that and probably military funded and, and those desires across theirs, does a lot for society. Then when you see something like a SpaceX come up, you start to say, okay, well this can accelerate right of how we do things, and it feeds back, and then the government can build upon it.
But the government also has a responsibility that says if I start working with private companies, Private data or the access to individuals information that typically was held by rights of government is not held under the same rights by private corporations. So I think governments have to still figure that out, right?
They can scale, they can take advantage of those innovations, but they are responsible for protecting individuals. And guess what? Certain entrepreneurs who are doing things have no obligation to do so. So there is a role for government that needs to protect rights.
[00:56:22] Phil Dillard: Sure, sure. Uh, that's a really good point, right.
I think they're better at policing, policing corporations or, um, encouraging. And there are more mechanisms for encouraging, um, good behavior in the corporate level than there are for the, you know, Sam Bankman Frieds and Elizabeth Holmes of the world, for example.
[00:56:41] Corey Glickman: Exactly. And if you think about it, so who's the government in, in our country?
It's us. Right. So you, you can't say, well, the government should do this or not this. It's like, you should vote, you should run for government. If you wanna be that change, you can't complain about it. Right.
[00:56:54] Phil Dillard: Well, super. Well, uh, Corey, um, thanks so much for sharing all this great insight and wisdom and experience of your career, and you're, you're doing so many amazing things.
We really appreciate you. What's the best way for people to reach you if they're trying to connect or learn more? Uh,
[00:57:10] Corey Glickman: well, first of all, thank you, Phil, for, you know, giving this opportunity to, um, talk through and hopefully we can do it again like, Talk all day with you. You're great at doing this. Um, so easy to get ahold of.
Um, so on LinkedIn, just put in my name. It should pop right up there. Put emphasis next to my name in it, you'll sure get. There's one other Cory Liman that I found on the internet and we actually talked to each other. We didn't know each other before, but just put emphasis next to my name and you'll find me the other one on Twitter, it's simply at Cory Liman. So very, very simple.
[00:57:37] Phil Dillard: Outstanding. Well, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate the opportunity to learn from you and share your wisdom with the audience, and we'll see you all next time on the next episode of Thruline to the 4th Sector. Please take a moment to rate and review the show and join us each week for a new episode. Thank you for listening.
Corey Glickman: Thanks so much.
Narrator: Thank you for listening to this episode of Thruline to the 4th Sector. I'm your host, Phil Dillard. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a rating and tell a friend. To learn more about the force sector economy, visit thrulinenetworks.com. That's T H R U L I N E networks.com. Thanks again and we hope to have you with us in the next episode.