Why Sustainability Tension Management Is Every Leader’s Competitive Edge With Steve Rochlin And Jeff Senne
Sustainability tension management is the secret edge of companies that thrive under pressure. Steve Rochlin and Jeff Senne—seasoned strategists and co-authors of a foundational report on sustainability strategy—unpack how high-performing organizations navigate the push and pull between short-term wins and long-term value. With host Christine Yeager, this candid conversation dives into CEO mindset archetypes, real business performance data, and how to align incentives without diluting purpose. From boardroom skepticism to strategic breakthrough, this is a masterclass in turning tension into transformation.
—-
Watch the episode here
Listen to the Podcast here
Why Sustainability Tension Management Is Every Leader’s Competitive Edge With Steve Rochlin And Jeff Senne
I have Steve and Jeff. Thank you so much for being here. I’m super excited to dive into this. My guests were co-authors of a report you may have seen on Trellis called How to Set Sustainability Strategy in 2025: Thriving in an era of impact and backlash. You both have decades of experience in the sustainability and ESG space. Sometimes, I joke with other people that there aren’t that many people who have over a decade of experience in sustainability when you see these job titles, but both of you do. Thank you for being here and sharing your knowledge and experience.
Steve, you’ve been in the space for over 25 years. Jeff, you have over two decades of experience transforming how organizations across private, public, and nonprofit sectors approach their purpose, responsibility, and leadership roles. Jeff is the Founder and CEO of Sandbar Solutions LLC and a strategic advisor to Fortune 500 companies, subject matter experts, and nonprofit organizations. You’re focused on helping leaders drive value through exceptional strategies, execution, and teaming. Your career spans influential roles in corporate, multilateral development, and nonprofit spheres.
At PwC, you were a corporate purpose and responsible business leader, and you directed a sustainability strategy for 55,000 employees, achieving remarkable results. Your experience includes pivotal roles in the United Nations Global Compact, where you developed the primary accountability framework that maintains the Integrity of the compact and the credibility of corporate participants. At the African Development Bank, you led the strategic partnership for governance program across 53 African countries, working with governments, NGOs, and private sector leaders to create targeted solutions for pressing governance challenges.
Your work with the UNDP in Chile focused on enhancing physical environmental, social, and governance performance for small and medium enterprises. Having worked across 40-plus countries and operating in three languages, you combine a global perspective with practical execution. You’re an avid kitesurfer with a twelve-year-old son, and you live in Washington, DC. Thank you for being here.
Steve, you’re a leading voice and advisor in sustainability and social impact. You have helped lead companies design and apply sustainability strategies built to achieve superior, financial, environmental, and social performance. You’re the Founder and CEO of Impact ROI, which helps organizations achieve superior, social, environmental, and financial performance. Through research and management consulting, Impact ROI assesses the value of sustainability and ESG, or environmental and social governance, and enables our clients to design high-impact strategies that support people, the planet, and profit.
As the lead author of the acclaimed Project ROI research series and co-author of the landmark report that we’re talking about, you have developed the pathway for companies to deliver sustainable impact that is also profitable. You’re also the co-founder of the precursor to Impact ROI, which was IO Sustainability. You served as the Head of North America for AccountAbility, the Head of North America Director of Global Advisory Services, and a member of the board of directors for the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship.
You also served as the head of research and development. Under your leadership, your organization demonstrated growth in revenues, reputation, and international presence. You’re also the co-author of two books, Beyond Good Company: Next Generation Corporate Citizenship, and Untapped: Creating Value in Underserved Markets. You’re a senior fellow for the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Corporate Citizenship Center, and also a Senior Fellow in Social Innovation for Babson College. We have remarkable bios here, and there’s even more that I trimmed down. I’m honored and humbled to be with you two. Thank you so much for your time. I thought we’d start with, how did you start working together? Where did you cross paths?
First of all, thanks for having us and for the wonderful introduction. We sound impressive. My twelve-year-old son should tune in to this. He doesn’t think I’m that impressive. Steve and I met in the early 2000s. I was at the United Nations Global Compact, and he was at Boston College. We knew a number of people in common, but our paths crossed specifically on an initiative that Steve was running. I remember a friend of mine said, “You have to meet this guy, Steve. He’s the most impressive person in the sustainability space that I know and understands the CEO lens, the business lens, and the societal lens.”
We met and became best friends. Moving forward, when I was at PwC, I hired Steve and was a client of Impact ROI, and we worked together. When I left PwC, I became a senior advisor for Impact ROI. Over the course of our relationship, we started to partner between my consultancy and his and go to market together. It’s been a wonderful friendship and professional relationship as well. Steve, what did I miss?
I’ve got to say amen to that. You’re too kind. I’m going to say the mutual admiration society with Jeff is that I’ve never met anyone in the sustainability profession who is more effective, a better change agent, and a better internal entrepreneur. Somebody who’s able to combine the unique perspectives of being an advocate for sustainability, but also a hard-nosed businessperson in sustainability. He’s one of the smartest people in the field that I’ve met. It’s a mutual fan club.
Living With Intention: Personal Sustainability Journeys
I’m a fan. I read the report, and I was like, “This is what I needed.” When I was leading sustainability at Coca-Cola, I needed this report to show to everybody. I am so grateful that you folks are willing to be on the show, and for us to talk about this because you’re speaking my language. This is great. We always like to start with, how do you live with intentions? Can you share how you bring intention into your day-to-day?
We’re going to talk a lot about intention and the tension in the sustainability space, but there’s tension in our individual lives. For me, it’s being intentional about recognizing those immediate gratifications versus delayed gratification. This is a lesson that I’m trying to work with my twelve-year-old son, and to learn and probably do a better job of it myself. Prioritizing wellness is a big issue for me. Trying to figure out what that looks like on a day-to-day and long-term basis is an area of focus for sure.
For me, I would say living with intention, at least as I’m understanding the question, is probably baked into my DNA. My parents were very involved in social justice in terms of their careers and vocation in life. They had three kids, and they would joke and say, “We’re hoping that one of them would become more greedy capitalists and focus on nothing else but making money.” All three of us are very mission-oriented. We can’t focus or do anything career-wise or in our lives if it doesn’t have a social justice or environmental justice mission related to it. It’s baked in.
Beyond Circularity: The Holistic Economy Perspective
Thank you for sharing. Jeff, in some of the pre-work. You mentioned that instead of talking and thinking about the circular economy, you think of it more as a holistic economy. Can you explain what you mean by that and share your perspective with our audience? Because we often talk about circularity here.
There’s a lot in this space. We go down the rabbit hole of acronyms and naming in this space, corporate responsibility, corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, responsible business leadership, or ESG. There are all kinds of terms. I think of them all within the same bucket. Although I have a favorite, which is corporate citizenship. That’s from my days at the United Nations Global Compact, because citizens have rights and responsibilities.
If corporations are citizens, and I’m not talking about in the terms of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which don’t get me started on. More in that they operate both with responsibility and privileges. That responsibility is multi-dimensional. It’s holistic. It’s not just people, planet, and profit. It’s the mix of all of the above. I think of circularity as a movement within a wider movement. It’s a means to responsibility and sustainability. I think more broadly about it within that lens.
Unpacking Sustainability Tension Management
Thank you. Thinking about the economic aspect of a circular economy, it’s something that people often think about, “You could reuse this. You could reuse that. Here’s the planet aspect of it.” In order to make the necessary shift, you’ve got to think about the economic aspect of it, or else it falls apart. Steve, in this show, we also try to break down some of the vocabulary terms that come up, like you mentioned.
People get lost in the acronyms, and sometimes that can make this a little hard and not approachable, in the sustainability space in general. In the report, you talk about the sustainability tension management approach, which was such a great concept and such a cool idea. Can you share with our audience what that means? What can people do with this concept?
I’ll try and avoid the acronym soup as much as possible, but Jeff and I started an interesting journey a few years ago where a number of our clients, colleagues, and folks we respected were starting to feel a lot of pain. They were reaching out to us and saying, “We’re starting to feel already the backlash on sustainability, ESG, and the rest, even before the presidential election. Can you help us think through what’s happening and how to move forward?”
We interviewed over 40 chief sustainability officers who are the equivalent from large corporations. Most of them are global corporations in a variety of industries that are mostly based in the US and Europe. We supplemented that with academic research. When we started going through the interviews, there were these powerful themes that were emerging that we didn’t quite know how to situate.
We fell upon an article and a concept called tension management, which is not about stress management. Although we know that’s important, it’s about how companies and their leaders can balance, understand, make trade-offs, and find alignment with short-term and long-term decisions increasingly between economic, environmental, and social considerations.
What the research suggested was that leaders were good at balancing, making trade-offs, and finding alignment with win-win-wins. Those companies outperform others in the market, and those companies tend to be better rated in sustainability. That unlocked for us what we were seeing in these interviews because we found that the CSOs and companies that were describing that they were effective and good at tension management were the ones that were happiest and most optimistic. It felt like we don’t care about the backlash, we’re powering through, and we’re going to do great, and we’ve got a plan.
The ones who were miserable, starting to wonder if they chose the right career, are unhappy in the environment, not getting support, and not getting trust, are the ones who seem to be struggling with tension management. That led us to say, “What is tension management in the sustainability context?” It’s a few things that I’ll go over very quickly, which are this notion of saying you have to understand and engage key stakeholders, understand the balance, and prioritize understanding that the CEO, first and foremost, is going to be your top priority stakeholder. That can be provocative, and we can dive into that if you like.
The second thing is understanding that your companies have these unset archetypes which try and fit environmental and social practices in conventional business models. It’s a very emotional wrestling match that people have in their minds to deal with that. Understanding those archetypes is critical. Jeff and I identified six common ones, and then we understood that we have to start thinking about developing a strategy that fundamentally identifies and balances core tensions around those archetypes.
Also, understanding that because we’re in a business, we have to understand that sustainability is not separated from the business. It has to align and support business results in a business case and value propositions. Last but not least is to take action and understand that there is a fundamental tension that, for the most part, sustainability relates much more to an entrepreneurial way of thinking and acting. That creates some conflict because lots of businesses are no longer very entrepreneurial. They’re not like startups there. They’re much more traditional than conventional linear in their approach to management, and that creates friction. That’s the concept that we build. Jeff, I’m sure I’ve left out key points.
I think that’s a great summation. That’s fabulous.
Influencing Leaders: The CEO's Lens On Sustainability
When I held the role at Coca-Cola as the director of sustainability PMO, I always said to the team, “Sustainability is the thorn in everybody’s side.” We keep coming at them, but you've got to make it a palatable thorn if you will. You’ve got to figure out a way to translate into their language. Otherwise, you’ll keep being the thorn that everybody is trying to ignore. We started to think about who the sustainability consumer is. How does that sustainability consumer overlap with the Coca-Cola consumer?
You can start to paint a picture like this that adds value to your brand. I do want to dig into understanding the CEO's or the CFO's perspective because that’s what this show is about. It’s confronting the discomfort that comes with change. Sustainability is uncomfortable if your business wasn’t built with that as a core component of the value proposition. That doesn’t mean it can’t become a core component of your value proposition.
If you design with circularity in mind, you might build a whole new, very loyal customer, and that will keep coming back to you because that’s a core value of theirs. You talked about the tension mapping. We talked on this show about the adversaries versus advocates, so thinking about who is supporting your sustainability initiative or your sustainability work, who’s actively against it, who’s in the middle, and how do you move the people that are in the middle into advocates?
You may never move the adversaries all the way over, but maybe you can move them into the middle. Can you talk a little bit about it and dive into that concept of how you frame things for the CEO? What’s some advice you might have for those reading on how to leverage this concept of tension mapping?
We probably have too much to say about this, so I’ll try and keep it brief. The first thing is to reinforce that the CEO, CFO are probably going to be your top stakeholders, or whoever the leader is who has the most juice and power to be your number one stakeholder. Research shows that the CEO is the most important factor in terms of whether or not a company's sustainability agenda moves forward, stalls, or moves backward. We have to accept that, and we have to understand where they’re coming from. I love what you’re saying.
The CEO is the most important factor in whether a company's sustainability agenda moves forward, stalls, or moves backward.
The second thing is that Jeff and I centered on these archetypes as being very powerful. What we find is it’s not useful to necessarily look at what others do, either sustainability heroes or sustainability villains. It’s more complex than that. You dive into the archetypes, and some of the archetypes that we’re all usually driven by in this field, with impact and purpose-driven. You’re doing sustainability to change the world for the better.
Another archetype might be brand and reputation. We’re doing this to enhance our brand and reputation value, or PR. There are others that relate to checking the box, or we do it because we have to, and don’t do an inch more. We can look at risk. We can look at driving immediate returns or innovation. These are all the different types of archetypes. It’s important to understand where our leaders sit with these and what’s driving them.
What we find is, very often, there’s a huge frictional intention when we’re not understanding this, when you’ve got people who are driven by impact and purpose, talking to someone who might be at risk reduction or immediate returns driven, or brand reputation. You’re going to have points of intersection where it seems like you’re completely aligned and speaking from the same sheet. The next day, it seems as if they’re 180 degrees different.
Understanding and illuminating those archetypes and those differences unlock why that’s happening. It allows a sustainability professional, as you're suggesting, to speak the language of the CEO and the CFO. Not just the hard-nosed business language, but their emotional language, because fascinating research says that CEOs often will take off their hard-nosed business hat and put on more of their hard-emotional hat when they’re talking about environmental and social issues for better and worse. Sometimes, we need to be more business-minded. This archetype is doing a diagnostic understanding. That is a key first step we find. Jeff, what would you add?
It’s interesting because in this conversation, it’s pretty easy to accept that the CEO is the first of many stakeholders, but that’s a pretty controversial statement. At least it would have been years ago before the ESG revolution if we think of what ESG was and not what it’s become, which is this highly politicized conversation. It was the culmination of two decades of work to say, “Investors see this as a material issue to profit generation and business success.” There were some crossroads between economics, sustainability, and social and environmental sustainability and responsibility. That’s the first thing.
It also shines a light on some real misconceptions in the sustainability space. Far too many sustainability leaders look at the company and they’re like, “We’re too focused on profit around here and the economics. I’m going to balance that out. My role is to balance that out by having this weighted focus on social and environmental.” I can understand that, but I think we, as sustainability professionals, should be modeling the behavior that we want the rest of the company to show. That is a balanced approach of people playing for profit and showing the wins where there’s a win-win, and showing, “There’s not a win-win here. There’s some tension between the different models. How can we manage that?”
There’s far more attention in this space than we like to admit. Jason Jay and Gabe Grant wrote a book many years ago about gridlock in space. They talk about sustainability professionals and the pitfalls that they fall into quite regularly. It’s spot on. They look at a CEO who’s not engaged on the issue, and they think that they’re somehow morally corrupt, or the sustainability leader will say something like they don’t get it as if they’re intellectually deficient. The sustainability leaders like to think of themselves as doing God’s work, and I get that. I was there. I started at the UN, for God’s sake.
It’s easy to think about ourselves as I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees kind of thing when we have to speak for the stakeholders, and that includes shareholders. We have to find that balance and manage those tensions within the system. I’m fond of Jim Hahn, a good friend of mine who’s at Microsoft. He was at Starbucks and Xanterra for many years. He says something very simple when he talks to C-suite leaders. He said, “Two questions. What keeps you up at night? What are you incentivized to do?”
He can understand and map the crossroads between his programming and theirs. I think that’s brilliant. It’s very simple. What it will point out is the tension, as well as the blue space, the opportunities where sustainability can directly support somebody else relieve their nightmares or help them meet their goals that get them incentivized. We might not like to admit it, but C-suite leaders and board members are people, too.
They are. I experienced quite a few people across Coca-Cola who were personally passionate about sustainability. We’re looking for guidance on how they can make sustainable choices in their day-to-day life. We’re also very aware that it’s hard for them to make sustainable choices in their business life. We’re looking for like, “What can we do? We have all this beating out, breakage, damage, and loss.” I had this one leader. She was a mentor of mine. She brought it up to me all the time like, “What am I supposed to do about this? How am I supposed to help handle that breakage, damage, and loss in a more sustainable way?”
When you look at the total challenges related to the billion pounds of plastic that Coca-Cola buys a year, the breakage, damage, and loss are very small. It wasn’t at the top of the sustainability agenda, but there’s got to be a way to play into some of those personal passions and give them the resources that they need to go do those activities. If you can empower everybody across the organization to do all of those things and it’s in line with driving value for the business, then you can be successful. That’s great. I love that.
Sustainability As A Business Feature: Driving Value
Also, in the report, you talk about sustainability as a feature. I love this idea. I said earlier that I wanted Coke to start thinking about designing for circularity as a value proposition to consumers. There’s real value in this concept. Can you give any advice on how sustainability professionals could start to use this technique to influence their leaders and how sustainability can be a feature?
Sustainability features an incredibly powerful value proposition. We’ve got the research to prove it. What sustainability features mean is that you express to your key business stakeholders, investors, customers, employees, and your other stakeholders that the company is intentionally designed to build sustainability into its business model, so sustainability becomes part of the brand promise.
Sustainability as a feature is an incredibly powerful value proposition.
A couple of examples from the tech space that I’ve run into are you look at a company like Dell, which is tracked. It’s been able to generate over a billion dollars in sales by featuring its sustainability program work across the board. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has identified that it’s been able to generate under $600 million in net revenue by factoring in sustainability features, particularly social and community-related activities, which sometimes get drifted in the conversation with B2B customers.
It’s that notion that if you have sustainability as a future. The work we’re doing to update, we’re about to launch our 2025 update to our Project ROI business case research, which was published years ago. What we’re finding, to give you a preview, of hot off the press, is that for companies that are good at sustainability as the future, what it does is not surprisingly to make your customers, investors, and employees trust you more. It also enhances your brand promise. Whatever your brand promise is, people believe it more and say, “You are going to make good on whatever you’re suggesting you are as a company and what your products and services can do. We’re going to believe that.”
That means that we want to be in a business relationship with you, and what that leads to is whether it’s business-to-consumer or B2B, there’s an opportunity to boost your sales by as much as 20%. There’s an opportunity to reduce your employee turnover by under 60%, and to increase your attractiveness to job seekers by almost 70%. More likely, they’ll accept a job offer from you if they think you’re the more sustainable company.
It can also boost your share price by as much as 6%. It can help you boost your profitability by up to 21%. It can also help you reduce your financial risk and reduce a whole variety of costs of financing, debt, and equity. The numbers are incredibly powerful. If you feature that notion of building in sustainability, it’s the future of who you are as a business.
I can’t wait for that report. That’s incredible. That’s what we need. It’s this hard fact because I know B Corps have reports out there about improved resilience for B Corps as a whole. There’s the ESG aspect of risk mitigation and how powerful that is, and supply chain disruption and things like that. It’s great now to see this continued build on the data of the success of driving sustainability as a core business value. Jeff, do you want to add anything?
No. I think Steve said it perfectly.
Navigating Change: Lessons Learned From Green Bronx Machine
I’m super jazzed and excited for the future of the world, so thank you for that. This show is about change and influencing change. Can you both share? I know, Jeff, you wanted to share an experience visiting the Green Bronx Machine. Can you share about a change you’ve experienced or led? Tell us what you learned from that.
First of all, in the sustainability space, we spend far too much time and maybe too much is the wrong way to say it, but we spend a lot of our time focused on the minutiae. You were talking about talking to your mentor at Coke or people in the C-suite. It seems common that people are like, “I have a passion for this, or I’m interested in sustainability. I just haven’t figured out how to marry it with my incentive and the structure of our company.”
Our answer is scope three emissions. It seems like we are ships that pass in the night. We need to spend more time studying the art of change. This is not an easy thing. There’s great research out there about the difficulty of driving change at the individual level. Anybody who’s been on a diet will know this, or has been through some change in their life that has been uncomfortable. It is not easy at the individual or the organizational level. Having some grace in that and understanding the difficulty of change and the differing incentives that exist within our society to do the exact opposite things, maybe in some cases.
That’s a specialty true in this era of tribal political polarization. I was reading a report that said, “70% of people wouldn’t help their neighbor if they knew that they were from an opposing political party.” This is a shocking state of affairs for the land of the free and the brave. I’m saddened by this, and this started years ago with Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone and the degradation of our social contract, our social relationships, and how we work.
I happen to be married to a Brazilian, so I see a lot of this through Latin American lands, and how different societies operate. As a society, we have some changes to make as well, and the organizations within it, and the individuals within it, and understanding that cascade. For me, I spent about half of my time working with nonprofits and working with corporations. I love that mix because you get two very different philosophies of change, growth, and life in those oftentimes.
Serving as a chief translation officer and understanding those two ways of thinking helps me be more adept and more flexible in my mindset. I’m excited. One of the nonprofits I work with, the primary one, is Green Bronx Machine, which is a nonprofit that started in a classroom with hydroponic gardening as a means to deliver a variety of curriculum and lessons in a very tangible, culturally relevant, and reachable way for students. It has amazing successes now in over a thousand schools around the world and has had great success in learning outcomes and, ultimately, in livelihood outcomes and community outcomes. I’m excited about marrying the corporate view with that nonprofit view.
That’s great. Steve?
I would like to say amen to what Jeff was saying. One of the most important skills in understanding the job is not to be a technical expert and not to get into the details in terms of what scope three knowledge or how to do CSRD compliance or any of that. It’s about change management. That’s the core and the success of the field. The research that we’ve done reinforces that so strongly. The way to think about change is I think about Jeff’s career and mine, and that’s what we’ve been focusing on in terms of helping companies understand the dynamics and technical elements of ESG and sustainability, but then applying it to change context.
What we’ve tried to do with our business case research is to drive that and bring it home in a couple of ways. There’s a story that I’ve been telling a lot more with people I’ve been resonating with. We're doing some strategy, design, ESG, and sustainability strategy work at the enterprise level for a big, famous food company, which we can’t name. There was a CFO who was known for being tough as nails, and we had a great interview with the CEO, but the sustainability team didn’t want to let us talk to the CFO because they thought that she would be so mean and hard on us that it would be uncomfortable and we’d run screaming.
I was saying no one in this field intimidates me anymore. I’ve been thrown out of boardrooms more than you can imagine. I’m not scared. I had the call, and the call starts with her saying, “Rockland, before you utter a word. I want to get one thing absolutely clear.” I’m like, “Maybe I am a little intimidated.” She goes, “How do we do sustainability as the number one factor in terms of whether our business succeeds or fails? Either we get this right and a great company fails, or we get it wrong and a great company fails, or we get it right and we thrive. There’s nothing more important than this.”
I went, “I was not expecting to hear you say that.” She goes, “You’ve been talking to the sustainability team, and I can’t understand what they say.” That brought it home to me. There’s a little debate going on in LinkedIn that I’m seeing with a lot of long-time ESG and sustainability professionals who were saying, “Sustainability ESG is a failure, and it has not achieved what we needed to, and the business case is irrelevant. We’ve invested too much time in that. It doesn’t make sense.” My reaction to this is that we don’t understand. I think we have a misguided impression in terms of why we need a business case in what we’re talking about here.
We need to use this to understand what the dominant language is and the dominant incentives that leaders of the company and every single person who works at the company have. You’ve said it earlier. Christine. We don’t speak their language. We don’t speak, understand, or relate to the incentives that are often legally codified that businesses work toward. We can’t make a change.
We can’t understand how we can integrate this. Sustainability will always be a sideline and always be this compliance exercise over here, and we’ll all just be box checkers. This change management and understanding the approach of speaking the right language, connecting you to the right incentives, and using the business case to align, get people on board, engage, and build trust is the real point of all this.
I love the chief translator and that example of the CFO being personally passionate and understanding the macro concept, but they can’t understand what the sustainability team is saying. Both of those are real challenges that people are facing. Everyone is asking me what sustainability is like in this climate, and you must not have much work.
The reality is that a lot of companies see the business value in resilience, in supply chain consistency, and the consumer who is picking up and continuously picking up the brands that they believe in. Those companies are continuing to prioritize sustainability. It’s the check-the-box companies that aren’t maybe doing it unless they have to. They still have to, in some cases, but it’s not going away. It’s getting a rebranding as it has in the past.
I don’t think ESG is a failure. I think forcing the CFO to look at sustainability as a risk and figuring out a mitigation is one of the smartest strategies that the sustainability profession has to bring this to the forefront of their report. It’s brilliant. I don’t think it has completely failed. It’s just getting a rebrand. That’s my opinion. Thank you. This was incredible. This was full of tons of wonderful nuggets.
We started out with the CEO lens versus the societal lens and the planet lens. I think we kept that theme throughout the conversation, and brought through an understanding of the unique perspectives of the different stakeholders and where they are. I loved that you summarized around understanding and engaging key stakeholders, and the emotional wrestling match that’s happening, then using that information to help build a strategy that balances core tensions. Sustainability is not separate. It should be ingrained, and all of that drives towards action.
Why Embrace Tension? Pressure Creates Diamonds
Those steps and thinking through those steps are a powerful way for our audience to take this and start acting on it. I also have a couple of new books to read. Thanks for sharing those. I forget which one of you brought up that change is hard, and we should have grace for it. Having grace for ourselves and for the people who are going through and trying to understand, and reminding everybody that everybody is at a different point in their change curve when it comes to whatever it is you’re talking about, and having grace with that is so important. I want to end with a question. I normally ask why I embrace change. However, because of the conversation, I want to ask why embrace the tension that comes with change?
There’s a saying that I'm fond of, which is, “Uber yourself before you get Kodak-ed.” I love that. Change is coming whether you want it or not. Embracing it and managing it is a much smarter strategy than pretending it’s not there or that you can somehow reverse the clock.
Sustainability is coming, whether you want it or not. So, embracing and managing it is a much smarter strategy than pretending it's not there.
I’ll use a couple of aphorisms and also a quick note. In a high-performance culture, performance athletes and whatnot, there’s a phrase, “Pressure creates diamonds.” I think in our field, tension creates diamonds. Understanding this allows for the kinds of creativity and kinds of strategic thinking that lead to better high-performance across all dimensions for people playing in profit.
That’s one key thing that is exciting. I also think that the world is unavoidable, and the world is incredibly dynamic. We overlook the incredible progress that’s been made across a number of dimensions. We get lost in the negative stories sometimes. At the same time, we can’t ignore the fact that we have ginormous challenges now. We have to face them head-on with courage, intention, in a collaborative way, and in an entrepreneurial way. The connection between tension management and fun entrepreneurship is close. It’s not just about stress and anxiety.
Thank you.
---
Tune in to our next episode where I talk with Sushma Kittali-Weidner, a software engineer who has turned into a sustainability strategist, about using AI and automation to make circular operations real. We cover everything from EPR and traceability to reuse experiments and internal champions. What if scaling sustainability didn’t add friction but removed it? If you’re working to turn sustainability from an afterthought into the default, this one is for you.
Important Links
About Steve Rochlin
For over 25 years Steve has been a leading voice and advisor in Sustainability and Social Impact. Steve has helped leading global companies design and apply Sustainability Strategies built to achieve superior financial, environmental, and social performance. Steve is Founder and CEO of IMPACT ROI, LLC which helps organizations achieve superior social, environmental, and financial performance. Through research and management consulting, IMPACT ROI assesses the value of sustainability and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) and enables our clients to design high impact strategies that support people, planet, and profit. As the lead author of the acclaimed Project ROI research series (described by Forbes as “a Godsend”) and co-author of the landmark Report “How to Set Sustainability Strategy in 2025: Thriving in an Era of Impact and Backlash,” Steve has developed the pathway for companies to deliver sustainable impact that is also profitable.
Steve has over 25 years of experience in sustainability, ESG, corporate responsibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and social impact. He has advised leading companies across a wide variety of industry sectors on how to improve sustainability performance in a way that drives competitive success. He was co-founder and CEO of IMPACT ROI’s precursor, IO Sustainability. For AccountAbility Steve served as the Head of North America, Director of Global Advisory Services and a member of the Board of Directors. For the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship Steve served as the Head of Research and Development. Under his leadership his organizations demonstrated growth in revenues, reputation, and international presence.
Steve is co-author of two books: Beyond Good Company: Next Generation Corporate Citizenship and Untapped: Creating Value in Underserved Markets. He is a Senior Fellow for the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Corporate Citizenship Center. He is also a Senior Fellow in Social Innovation for Babson College. Steve obtained his MPP from the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and his A.B. from Brown University.
About Jeff Senne
Jeff Senne is a pioneering force in sustainability and ESG leadership and execution, with over two decades of experience transforming how organizations across private, public, and non-profit sectors approach their purpose, responsibility, and leadership roles. As the Founder and CEO of Sandbar Solutions, LLC, Jeff is a strategic advisor to Fortune 500 companies, SMEs, and non-profit organizations, helping leaders drive value through exceptional strategies, execution, and teaming.
His career spans influential roles in corporate, multi-lateral development, and non-profit spheres. At PwC, as Corporate Purpose and Responsible Business Leader, Jeff directed sustainability strategy for 55,000+ employees, achieving remarkable results. Jeff's experience includes pivotal roles at the United Nations Global Compact, where he developed the primary accountability framework that maintains the integrity of the Compact and the credibility of corporate participants. At the African Development Bank, he led the Strategic Partnership for Governance Program across 53 African countries, working with governments, NGOs, and private sector leaders to create targeted solutions for pressing governance challenges. His work with UNDP in Chile focused on enhancing fiscal, environmental, social, and governance performance for small and medium enterprises.
A celebrated thought leader, Jeff has authored numerous influential publications and currently hosts "Making Waves on Purpose," a podcast that explores the intersection of business and society.
Having worked across 40+ countries and operating in three languages, Jeff combines a global perspective with practical execution. Jeff holds a Master of Arts in International Peace Studies from the United Nations University for Peace and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Illinois. He is an avid kitesurfer, married with a 12-year-old son, and lives in Washington, D.C.