Interview with Kerry Duggan, SustainabiliD
From the White House & the Department of Energy to founding SustainabiliD, Catherine spoke with Kerry Duggan about how to foster public-private sector collaboration to advance sustainability goals. They spoke from the WRISE Leadership Forum in D.C. about this & the intersection of environmental justice & sustainability consulting. Kerry is a corporate Board Director at BlueGreen Water Technologies, Envergia & Perma-Fix Environmental Services, & in this episode she “shared the password” (as she says) on strategies to earn board positions, & tactfully ensure your expertise & qualifications become known.
SustainabiliD has partnered with leading organizations, including think tanks, major universities, national laboratories, philanthropy, global manufacturers, global investment banks and funds, climate tech companies and business accelerators, including Elemental Impact, Emerson Collective, Our Next Energy, LuxWall, Aeroseal, ClearFlame Engine Technologies, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Mill, Wallbox, Aclima, Walker-Miller Energy Services, Newlab, BlueConduit, Yardstick Management, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), Asian Development Bank, Ceres, University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), Syzygy Plasmonics, Adaptive Energy, Aspen Institute, Milken Institute, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Argonne National Laboratory, Energy Foundation, ONsemi, Whirlpool Corporation, RockCreek Global Investment, University of Michigan Erb Institute & Vesta.Thank you, Kerry, for sharing sustainability success stories from some of these companies in this episode!
Transcript
Catherine: Hi, I’m Catherine McLean, Founder and CEO of Dylan Green. We’re filming today at the WRISE Leadership Forum in Washington, DC. And I sat today with Carrie Dugan, who’s the founder and CEO of SustainabiliD. Nailed it. So thank you for joining me. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your current role?
Kerry: Sure. Well, founder and CEO, just like you, so fist bump and all the fun that goes with that. I started my company about eight years ago when I left the White House. I was President Biden’s climate advisor when he was the vice president. I also helped run President Obama’s Detroit task force for about six and a half years of my time in service. And before that, I was at the Department of Energy in Erie, Clean Energy Office. The two features that I took out of my time in service into the company were advising executives on climate policy, politics, the state of technology, and how to talk about it. So I do a lot of that sort of executive C-suite coaching for multinational corporations, labs, think tanks, universities, and so on. And then the other feature of my time in service was deploying climate tech in a distressed environment before it was common knowledge about what the climate tech is. So think about highly disruptive technology.
Do you remember when you didn’t know what an LED light bulb was? There was a time when it wasn’t a household term. And so deploying that kind of tech in challenging conditions, I was successful doing that in Detroit and helping with the streetlight conversion to LEDs, second largest streetlight conversion in the country, took like every diplomatic tool I had in my toolbox to help them pull off. But that’s what we do now inside the company is helping these types of technology companies scale.
And then for me, the magic is when I can introduce a climate tech company to a very bullish CEO and they can talk about offtake agreement and makes the CEO look really smart. It helps these companies scale. And so in between that space, I also do a lot of thought leadership.
I’m here at WRISE, totally enjoying myself, by the way. Great, great vibe.
Catherine: Yeah, it is a great vibe. It’s a diverse group of women. Which is so exciting to see.
Kerry; Yeah, it’s awesome. I find myself rarely in rooms where I don’t know the far majority of folks. Yes. So it’s actually really wonderful to meet so many new people.
Catherine: You’ve had leadership roles in both the public and private sector. You mentioned the White House, Department of Energy you’re also working with. What key lessons have you learned about fostering collaboration between these two sectors in advancing SustainabiliD goals?
Kerry: Well, I am a student of Joe Biden, and so a lot of it comes down to relationships. I really stress, and I also teach at University of Michigan, and part of my coursework is actually teaching students not, you know, the fundamentals of policy, but how to make it practical and get it done. And, you know, why networking in a non-transactional way really matters. And I think that’s something women are really uniquely suited to do more of. We’re mobilizing. Yeah.
So, you know, and I think that we, I know that we spend a lot of time as women just being snap judged. And I feel like we don’t, that’s not how we necessarily treat others. So I’m always happy to go down another layer and what else, what else are you doing? What else are you facing? How else can I help you? So fostering trust based on a real relationship, I think is totally fundamental. And it’s a big piece of how we, our practice runs. So a big chunk of our work with climate tech is site selection. And community engagement. And the calls I get from big companies a lot of times are like, how, what’s the fast track to community engagement? I’m like, you’re missing the whole point. But they’re under enormous pressure to access the Biden-Harris bucks. And you can’t do that without community engagement. So I see the lane for women. In a big way here.
Catherine: We were just speaking with Shalonda Baker, who I’m sure you work a lot with.
Kerry: Yeah, happy to have her in Michigan.
Catherine: Exactly. And she was just saying the same thing, that she’s left a legacy that you have to do X, Y, Z in order to get those dollars. And I think that’s extremely important. SustainabiliD has partnered with global corporations, think tanks, major universities, national laboratories, and accelerators. Can you share some of the examples of your clients’ success stories of having partnered with you?
Kerry: Yeah. I mean, probably my favorite one at the moment. I was a particular climate tech company that we work with, very novel technology, and they approached us to help with their community benefits plan. They were putting an application into the Department of Energy and we really coached them. I mean, we went slow and meticulous because they were eager to learn. They want to learn how to do it right because they’re going to scale in multiple places. And we have to explain that every place is different. You know, but the feedback they got from their grant application was the best community benefits plan the department had ever read. And so that made me really proud and happy for the company. A lot of the novel technologies that are out there now, they need that social license to deploy. And if you hear the secretary talk, it’s all deploy, deploy, deploy. Those cannot do that unless you’ve pre-built the trust and baked in it. So I’m really proud of that body of work that we’re doing.
But I’ll also say I’m just onboarding my first male in eight years. My new managing director for consulting and operations. And he’s a disabled, service disabled veteran. He was my leadership coach when I was at the Department of Energy. So he’s always sort of been in the background and following along what I’ve been doing. But now he sees how important, from a national security standpoint, the mission is.And he has also has visibility. He was on my advisory board first. He has visibility into the climate tech companies we’re serving and realizing, you know, these are superb technologists, not necessarily managers. So we’re trying to professionalize climate tech as quickly as we can. To achieve speed and scale. So those are kind of the fun things we’re working on.
Catherine: That’s really interesting. What is your perspective on the intersection of environmental justice and SustainabiliD consulting? So how does SustainabiliD incorporate equity considerations into your approach?
Kerry: Well, the practice of building a community benefits agreement, either with a large multinational or a climate tech company, that is the practice. And a lot of why I do this work comes from that piece I was doing for President Obama. President Obama started as a community organizer. So he understood how to elevate the level of the community voice. Big and small companies don’t necessarily have that approach. I’m lucky to have the background I do, which comes out of advocacy and all those things. And having had success doing this work in Detroit, I think that’s actually how I got picked up to be President Biden’s climate advisor. I saw that I could do the high-level policy, but I also know how to do this in a new way. Which is listen first, provide capacity. In my case, I was embedded to be the capacity partner. Provide the subject matter expertise and technical assistance, then throw in the resources. So you’re sort of building capacity and expertise before you throw in the money. Peer learning is something we also employ. And then celebrating the successes. So I’m not a person who parachutes in and parachutes out. And I try to teach people that as well, because that’s not a way to be very respectful with the community. So that’s kind of what I’m about. And I did study environmental justice as a grad student at Michigan. So I’m really grateful that I have that in my background. And I was able to take that in with me to the Department of Energy, to the White House, and to what I do now. So it’s sort of embodied in all that we’re doing.
Catherine: The final question I have for you is, you’re on the Board of Directors at Blue Green Water Technologies and Envergeon, and Permafix Environmental Services. I receive a lot of inquiries from women who are interested in joining boards. And some of them do know where to start and how to prepare, because they think there are some great tools that hopefully you’ll highlight. But also, a lot of them aren’t exposed to where the opportunities are. So you can also talk about that, please.
Kerry: Yeah. I call this exercise sharing the password.
Catherine: I like that.
Kerry: And I think that’s something women, again, we need to do a better job of. Traditionally, it’s the old boys club. And you know the numbers about women on corporate boards. So I’m on a publicly traded one and two private one. Very much global in practice. And how I found my way on, there are some tools. In fact, there was a session yesterday for executive leaders, and I talked about this. But at the end of the day, I’d probably say this one three times a week.
People only know what you tell them. So I gave an example under Chatham House really yesterday. I’m not going to tell you who, but I gave an example of a very senior male energy leader in our community who knew what I was doing before in policy. And when he saw that I didn’t go back into service full time, I’m on the Secretary of Energy’s advisory board. But when he saw that, he’s like, well, what are you doing? I’m like, well, I’m doing corporate board work.
He’s like, I didn’t know you were interested in corporate board work. And I’m flabbergasted. I’m like, of course. I wasn’t interested. And that’s when it clicked for me.
You have to tell them. So I actually said that yesterday. You have to let people know. And it’s actually pretty easy to figure out who’s on a board. Everything’s on websites. So if there’s a company you’re particularly interested in and you happen to know someone, verbalize it. And then there’s some tactical stuff you can do. There are some things like if you looked at my LinkedIn, you’d be able to see how it’s structured. That’s intentional. And there’s a way on LinkedIn you can tell people that you’re open to board work. You should be making it very easy for people to find you.
Catherine: That’s very interesting. So there’s a way to specifically as a job title, so when it says you’re open to work, so recruiters can see it, not so you have the green banner around your head, but there’s a job title that actually is board of directors. Do you know, I have never seen anyone have that job title listed.
Kerry: It’s in the section that’s just below your profile where you say what you’re open to.
I’ll show you right after that.
Catherine: That is very interesting.
Kery: I think it’s simple tools like that. And that’s another thing, just doubling down on the people only know what you tell them, right? Make it easy, make it easy on yourself. And then as far as preparing, I can get a little tongue in cheek because I don’t know a whole lot of men that took a class on how to be on a board. So I’m always a little reluctant. Like if you’ve made it into this room, you probably have what it takes. If you’re a CFO, you definitely have what it takes, To be on an audit committee and those, those are hard to find. So make it known, tell your, tell your other women, tell, especially tell the men.
Catherine: Well, you know, somebody said to me the other day, they were like were over mentored and under sponsored. And now I was like, Ooh, that really rocks my world. Cause it was such a good point. She was like, and mentorship is important. Of course it’s important. I’m not saying it’s not important, but if I look at my career and the successes I’ve had a lot of it has had male been with having male allies who have sponsored me. And who have brought me up to where they feel like I was capable. And I just needed to, to have that courage to, to realize that as well. And so I think that just to your point about just telling people and letting people know.
Kerry: Especially for women, especially, you know, humble midwestern girls like myself, I think I also have basketball in my history. So like I have a little more gumption than your average Midwestern gal. But I had a lot of gumption. So for probably a good five year, four or five years after starting my company, I always just talked about the work and the substance of what we did, you know, policy, politics, tech and comms. And one of my friends who was just leaving the white house she, she phoned me and she said, why don’t you tell people that you had the president’s comment advisor? And I’m like, well, it sounds kind of like, you know, she’s like, but you were. So she, her message MCM, we’re all still learning. She said, say the thing. Cause not everyone can say that. So, I mean, I, I don’t like coming off arrogant or whatever, but I, but I did that work and it was really hard.
Catherine: And I just really think he goes back to our DNA. It’s just like, it’s so ingrained in society. Like we’re really, we’re trying to redo or undo, shall we say the patriarchy and it’s not going to happen overnight.
Kerry: We’re unlearning while we’re learning, relearning. But I, this came up yesterday too, in the session I was in, I use basketball terminology sort of on purpose because it is universal, especially with the men that also, they always, including the president wanted to talk hoops with me. I retired a long time ago, but there’s one piece of it that I’ve done a speech on this. Like if you see the lane and we do, you have to take it and don’t wait for permission. So that’s how I did my company. That’s how I was successful in government. I helped disrupt a very top down, a way of doing business by just saying, I see this path, give me what I need and get out of my way. And thankfully I had great leaders, secretary Moniz and at the time chief of staff, Kevin Knobloch, I will never forget. I went up to brief him and I was like sweating bullets, totally type A, written this long memo, like, here’s what I think the agency can do and in place and in a specific place. And he’s like, yeah, we’re just going to cut you loose and you’re going to go do what, do all that you can. They trusted me and that worked out pretty well. So leadership matters.
Catherine: Leadership matters. Well, it was so nice to meet you. I really can’t believe we’ve not met before.
Kerry: Well, there was COVID and busy things, but I’m sure this isn’t our last time chatting.
Catherine: Thank you. Take care