Resources

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• Deloitte Climate and Sustainability (including Deloitte Center for Sustainable Progress)
• Deloitte: Turning Point Report
• Deloitte’s Global Sustainability and Climate learning program
• Deloitte’s work noted in the interview:
  • French fast food company/EcoProgress
  • Cargill
  • DSM
  • World Wildlife Fund
  • World Economic Forum

Guests

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Climate Rising Host: Professor Mike Toffel, Faculty Chair, Business & Environment Initiative

Guest: Jennifer Steinmann, Global Sustainability and Climate Practice Leader, Deloitte

Transcript

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Editor’s Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview.

Mike Toffel:
Jen, thank you so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Jen Steinmann:
Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Mike Toffel:
I wonder if we could just start with an introduction to your role and how you got there at Deloitte?

Jen Steinmann:
Absolutely. So I serve as Deloitte's Global Sustainability and Climate Practice leader, and that really just means that I'm across all of our businesses, which includes tax, risk, financial advisory, audit insurance, and consulting globally for sustainability. And I've been in the role for just over a year. I've played many roles at Deloitte since I joined in 1995. Each one of them sort of a building block onto the next, so most notably leading HR for our US business, focusing on transforming HR. And then I took on a role leading transformation for all of our US businesses, which included strategy and innovation and technology. A little bit over a year ago, our global CEO, Punit Renjen, asked me to take on this role with an eye towards looking at issues differently and shaping the business and scaling it and doing that against the backdrop of fulfilling our purpose, which is making an impact that matters.

Mike Toffel:
So how did these roles in strategy, operations, HR, and other roles that you've been in at Deloitte, how have they prepared you to take on the leadership of this sustainability and climate practice?

Jen Steinmann:
It's thinking holistically in terms of looking at a problem from end to end, thinking about it with, and this may be an overused term now, but with a transformation lens. When I was in my transformation role, we did a back of the envelope analysis that looked at market performance of about 37 companies that were undergoing seismic transformation. And what that suggested was that transforming from a position of strength, organizations were much more likely to succeed. And so we want to work with our clients to help them navigate the enormous complexity of climate change. And so I think leveraging that experience, that thought leadership around end to end transformation is really what helped me bridge between the two roles.

Mike Toffel:
So what does end to end transformation entail?

Jen Steinmann:
we've been trying to boil it down to what most organizations need to focus on, strategy, operations, finance reporting, and importantly, start to think about it in those terms so that organizations can look at the different components of solving a problem through the lens of what they do on a day to day basis, rather than as I think about it, a side order of climate, so how do you embed that into the organism of the entity.

Mike Toffel:
Great. How did climate and sustainability get on the radar of Deloitte? How did Deloitte get into that space?

Jen Steinmann:
I think as we all know, and you've been so good about sharing in your podcast, climate change is really a global issue. While everyone from governments to NGOs, to individuals has a responsibility to protect our planet, we really believe that business must play a critical role leading on climate change. And so we've been in this business of helping our clients around this for over 20 years. We look at working with our clients on climate action strategies, how do you build that into your operations, how do you mitigate risks that come with a warming world, but it's really hit a tipping point over the last several years.

I'll give you an example. We did a Deloitte survey of over 2,000 global CXOs. This was over the course of the last six, seven months. 97% of them said their companies had already been negatively impacted by climate change. We had actually run that survey a year before. And at that point it was 60% saying the same thing. So you could see over the course of less than a year that attitudes have changed. And so we have determined that it was really important, both for our clients and for us, to scale this business. Clients are trying to navigate the enormous complexity of going from commitment to action, as well as determining, in my sort of parlance, what they must do versus what they can and should do.

in April we made a billion dollar investment to combine our advisory audit, assurance, consulting, finance, and tax services, and really work on scaling that and scaling it through the lens of societal imperative.

Mike Toffel:
With manufacturing companies, a billion dollars might go into the design of products and services and manufacturing equipment and manufacturing plants. What does a billion dollars look like at a consulting and tax and audit firm like Deloitte?

Jen Steinmann:
Yeah, it's not quite as clear when you talk about a professional services firm, right? But we are shaping it around several key efforts. In April, we launched the Deloitte Center for Sustainable Progress, which I like to think of as our think and do tank. The center over time will be a dedicated network of experts that focused on holistic, results oriented, data-driven thought leadership and analysis, and then working through how you get that from the thought leadership into the marketplace. So bridge kind of capabilities, as well as a convening mechanism across the multiple dimensions of how you solve problems so with nonprofit, government, academics, et cetera, working together to solve problems. So that's one aspect of the investment.

The other is really around thinking through new services. adjacent businesses, ones that we might not have been in before hanging off of our traditional services. And then upscaling our entire population at Deloitte. So all of our professionals really need to know quite a bit more around improving climate literacy and demonstrating that in the marketplace. We are now over the course of the next year and launching in September an entire program dedicated to educating our people all close to 400,000 of them. And so we'll continue doing some work around that as well.

And as you can imagine, alliance relationships with existing technology partners as well as new technology is incredibly important. I have a strong belief that none of this gets done without a technology underpinning ultimately. And so we need to learn how to incorporate tech as part of the solution. And so all of those aspects, thought leadership, getting our people ready, and underpinning it with technology are some of the examples of how we put the investment in place.

Mike Toffel:
I guess a billion dollars does go a long way when you're spreading it across people. So a new think tank center, a think do tank, new adjacent business lines, training up your staff, yeah, it's quite an ambitious roadmap. Where will this be taking place? Is this going to be at all your offices or that's going to be concentrated in a few of them?

Jen Steinmann:
Our practice is really global in nature. This is a top three issue for our client and it has been for well over 18 months. That's pretty sticky around the globe. And so in parallel, that becomes a top issue for us as we shape our business. We have all of our businesses aligned to scale and all of our geographies as well. What I will say though, I think, that goes to your question is that different geographies lend themselves to different expertise. And so, as we think about the types of services that we put into the marketplace, the industry intersection between those services, you might have some spikes in different places. And so we'll look to stand up centers of expertise that can be deployed across the globe potentially from one hub.

Mike Toffel:
Can you give us any early insights as to which types of expertise or which type of topics will be deployed in different locations?

Jen Steinmann:
It's still forming, but if I look at Asia Pacific as an example, very much early thinking and working through nature-based solutions And then if you think about what might be applicable in Europe, one of the things that puts Europe ahead is the policy side of the equation has been more advanced than in other parts of the globe. And so you see some spikes there based on what's happening from a regulated environment because there's an intersection there as well. And so we have a lot of expertise around automotive and right now substantive focus on energy. So it gives you a sense of how this might sort of cascade around the globe.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah, really interesting. So we've been talking about the roots and the plans of your practice and the center and the other business lines. Let's dive into some of the work that's going on now or that's recently occurred in your strategy, and you mentioned they divide into strategy and operations, finance, reporting. Let's talk about the strategy. So what are some examples of the types of work you do in strategy?

Jen Steinmann:
Strategy actually turns out to be broader than I might have thought of 20 years ago, 30 years ago when I started doing strategy work. But the offerings under the pillar of strategy might include things like climate and ESG assessments and analytics. It might include sustainability strategy and roadmap development or customer and green product strategy and innovation. It might also include things like merger and acquisition advisory, or risk strategy, workforce strategy, policy strategy. So all of those things could get embedded under the moniker of strategy.

I'll share a little bit about operations because I think there's a strong interplay with strategy and operations, and then give you a concrete example. And so under operations then, you're looking at things like decarbonizing, how do you think about that through the lens of innovation and technology. So applying that into operations, sustainable operations, supply chain transformation, tax restructuring, organizational change, and HR management infrastructure solutions, it kind of becomes fairly significant.

And so to give a real world example of the work we do under strategy and operations pillars, we've been working with a fast food company in France that really has a vision to become a leader in sustainability. The brand itself was facing some negative perception regarding treatment of its workforce, its overall environmental impact, and the view of promoting junk food. So we worked with them to develop a 10 year progress plan to evolve the product and transform them over time into a family friendly, eco-friendly sit down restaurant.

So we did a lot of revision of their supply chain. We built relationships. We worked with them to develop relationships with French suppliers and farmers for potatoes and beef and chicken and lettuce and wheat and made sure that we were looking at pricing as it pertains to that. What's interesting about this is when you start to think about how change might take place, and sometimes it takes a long time, over the period of time we've been working with them, today 75% of their food actually originates in France. And that's a big thing when you're looking at sustainability, is to get more focus on a local product.

So as part of that, we also created a national waste plan by supporting a sustainable waste strategy based on packaging, eco design, waste sorting and collection of abandoned waste. And then we onboarded all of the restaurants, 1,400, to monitor their environmental performance, share best practices and actually build it under a program called EcoProgress. That program, and this is where the tech comes in, is based on a digital tool and a dedicated team that coordinates across all of the workforce and a team of upskilled employees trained to input, analyze the data, and really look at it from a more holistic perspective in the datas collected. And It feeds into that client's global commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 35%.

So it gives you one example of how you go from, where do we want to go, what commitments have we made, how do we then start to decompose our business processes, our supply chain, how do you get into that and start to impact the supply chain. And then once you've started doing that work, how do you then create first accurate then transparent reporting mechanism that is based on scientific data. So it's quite quite involved.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah, that's a very comprehensive turnaround story it sounds to me for this fast food company. How did climate enter the picture for a fast food company concerned about reputation of selling not so healthy food? It's not obvious where the idea of a climate and sustainability lens being applied to that problem would come from. Was that from them or was that from you or from outside stakeholders?

Jen Steinmann:
Just to sort of pull it up a level because I think your question is really applicable to all companies that are trying to think about this. I've been thinking about it in terms of multiple facets. One, what's my customer base like? What's my target market? Where are they going? What do they want? How do I think about internal, external stakeholders? All the dimensions that one looks at, the lens of stakeholder capitalism. And then as the company starts to look at where do we want to go in the future, we know that most organizations feel a certain amount of pressure, whether it's regulated or not, to make declarations around what they're going to do. So it's a commitment. And then how do you go from commitment to action is actually the hard problem to solve right now.

Within that, there's the question of, "Am I doing this as an offensive play or a defense play?" Offense is the opportunity. I can look 10 years down the road and understand that I need to reshape my strategy for an eventual future so that my organization is still relevant and prosperous. The defense play is what do I have to do because it's regulated. And by the way, that's a lot of work too, just thinking through where the company is in operation and how they need to interplay with the different regulatory environments and the rules, what they need to report on, what they're being pressured to report on. So there's still a lot of work to be done around that, but it then internalizes in terms of, "Here's the commitment I made. Now, how do I get to that outcome?" And there's a lot of scrutiny around that outcome.

So when we get back to this particular client's example, I actually think they went on the offense. And so they are looking around the corner and seeing that where we started as an organization's not necessarily the end destination. So a chance to transform back to that transformation point.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah. Super interesting. Well, that's an interesting example that expands the strategy and operations realms. Let's dive into the finance area. So what does it mean to have a finance domain in your climate and sustainability practice? What does that encompass?

Jen Steinmann:
Right. So the finance pillar is really about securing and allocating resources toward key sustainability efforts. So leveraging the evolving capital market transition to increase sustainable investments and optimize cost and capital structure. So within this offering, we tend to look at things like carbon trading markets, restructuring, government grants and incentives, capital planning and management, and treasury management. And maybe it'd be helpful to give an example around this one as well to kind of bring that to life?

Mike Toffel:
Great. Yeah, that'd be terrific.

Jen Steinmann:
So in this space, and it's not something we've talked about yet, but the companies actually need to collaborate to get to an outcome. So within this space, the example I'll give you is that we're working on a partnership with an oil and gas company, a national government agency, and a local government agency that invests in clean energy solutions. And so we were engaged to assess the supply and demand opportunities for hydrogen in a given region and asked to engage industry, government and other ecosystem players in making the required investment to enable a hydrogen hub in that region. We see a lot of activity in and around hydrogen. Governments and organizations are working together to define and deploy hydrogen strategies. It actually requires a multidisciplinary and cross business approach and no longer that one to one relationship that you might think about in professional services,

Mike Toffel:
So given the range of organizations that this partnership is reaching, oil and gas company, national and local governments, and involving hydrogen as a clean energy solution, I imagine you must also have to reach well across the Deloitte organization to get experts in with the talents available to understand the oil and gas industry, the hydrogen space and government relations. So are you kind of matching your client partnership with an internal team that's sort of a similar partnership?

Jen Steinmann:
Absolutely. Actually, it's one of the things I love most about my job. We've just talked about fast food and now we're talking about hydrogen. Every single day there are different questions that we're getting from our clients. On the face of it, if you're looking at this as a, "What do I need to report on?" exercise, it's not quite as challenging as how do I actually make change happen. We need to pull together all sorts of parties within Deloitte.

Where it gets even more interesting is we can't do it ourselves working with our clients. We actually have to pull in our technology partners, we have to pull in outside expertise as well at times. We need to work with non government organizations to make this happen. And so it really is a major job to bring things together in a space where not everything is either solved for yet,. It's all relatively new. I think applying an innovative mindset and getting creative thinking across industries as opposed to in industry silos for proxy examples that might cut over, those are all things that organizations need to do.

Mike Toffel:
So we have here at HBS about 200 faculty. And so when we get an inbound inquiry from a reporter or from a student or from alumni to ask us, "Who knows about X? Who can talk to us?", we can kind of do it through word of mouth or just general who you know in the halls. When you're dealing with an organization of 400,000 people, how do you keep track and identify the right people for whether it be this partnership or the fast food company engagement or any engagement? How do you tap into the talent that you have given it's so many people in so many different offices around the world in different languages?

Jen Steinmann:
Right. So there's the easy answer, which is I've got this great team. My leadership team includes every dimension of the business. So it includes our geographies, it includes our industries, it includes our businesses. So there are about 20 of us that work around the globe together at that leadership level. I think of it as hub and spoke, so there are certain things that we do centrally to support all of our businesses and create facilities. We also spend a lot of time on keeping eyes on the business. So that's through how do we understand what the inbound is, to your point around what our clients are asking for, how do we keep an eye on what the trends are, and then also how do we understand where our people are.

This has evolved. But really organizing ourselves around this, we've then been able to do a call for people. And so we've got approximately 4,000 and growing people that have dedicated most of their time in this space. And also we've done a very strong scan of people to get them to classify what their experience set is and how much they know in the space so that we can call upon them for subject matter expertise. We've got a list of approximately 700 and growing people across all different dimensions of the rubric for our clients that we can call upon at any point for expertise. So word of mouth, to your point, is not really feasible. But you know how it goes even in large companies, it's always evolving. but we're trying to automate it as much as possible.

Mike Toffel:
Right. Interesting. Yeah, that's helpful. Thanks. All right. So let's pivot and talk about the reporting pillar, What does that encompass?

Jen Steinmann:
Sure. we advise clients on how to set up a reporting framework that meets their stakeholders' demands, or is in compliance with regulations, whether they're new potentials. You sort of look out a little bit and start to prepare for the potential ones. Internal stakeholders are wanting to know about an organization's responsible practices and see that rewards are fairly allocated. Investors, customers, creditors, rating agencies, regulators, media, all increasingly demand transparency to understand an organization's risk and opportunity profile. So some of our clients start by identifying and measuring ESG performance in an unstructured and ungoverned way. And then they feel they need a refresh and a new baseline, whereas others are looking at it from a clean sheet of paper. So we look at ESG readiness and assurance. We do a lot of work around governance. We do work around integrated reporting and regulatory compliance around data management and controls and investor relations and communications.

One of the things you and I haven't talked about yet is that when we think about strategy, operations, finance, and reporting, a lot of the work that's being done today by most organizations in a let's call it lumpy regulatory environment is really still on the edges. So how should we think about this from a strategy perspective? What type of commitments should we make? And then from a reporting perspective, what are the outputs? The hard work to be done is still in progress around operations and finance. So we do a lot in reporting today. It's a large part of our existing business.

For reporting, I'll give you the example: Cargill is one of the world's leading cocoa and chocolate producers. And so they wanted to set up a data-driven digital platform that makes their supply chain significantly more transparent. In order to prevent cocoa beans from deforested areas entering the supply chain, which is really key to making cocoa production more sustainable and fair, they needed to be able to track a batch of cocoa beans back to the farm where they were grown. What we worked with them on is using cocoa bag barcodes. This is just one example of how the digital platform we worked with them on named CocoaWise helps food and beverage manufacturers make better informed environmental, social, and business decisions.

So how it worked is the platform aggregates the most crucial data available in the supply chain so that Cargill customers around the world can easily access details about where and how crops are grown and by whom. The CocoaWise platform basically functions as a suite for a host of data-driven tools, each one tailored for specific objectives that allow the cocoa industry to steer firmly towards environmental and sustainability goals.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah. So a Cargill client can scan the barcode of cocoa that have been delivered to them and they could understand how it's been shipped to them, where it came from in the supply chain. Is that the idea?

Jen Steinmann:
Yeah. And Cargill customers can connect more deeply to the communities from which they purchase their cocoa. It allows them to monitor firsthand the impact of their investment choices.

Mike Toffel:
Interesting. And then you've also worked in health and nutrition with DSM.

Jen Steinmann:
Right. DSM focuses on health, nutrition and biosciences. DSM created a cow feed supplement called Bovaer that reduces methane emissions by about 30%. The background here is that every ruminant, which is probably a word I've never used before in my life before I started doing this kind of work, but every ruminant on earth produces methane, releases an equivalent of three tons of carbon dioxide per year into the air. Not to be crude, but it's burp by burp. And so like carbon dioxide, methane is a greenhouse gas that really does add up to global warming. And so, although its warming effect is shorter lived, it's much more potent than carbon dioxide. So if you want to counteract global warming and eliminate methane emissions, it actually pays off right away. Bovaer is the result of lengthy research and developed process by DSM. And over the last five years, we've helped our partner strategically position and market it, working from the proposition of farm wise, climate friendly. And this conveys the idea that you can actually enjoy nutritious food like dairy and beef in a more sustainable way.

In addition to looking at that innovative business model with DSM, getting farmers to embrace the product is key to making this work. So trace your methane reductions, get rewarded. And so we were able to develop a very first version of a platform that reliably documents the methane cuts so that farmers can prove their exact contribution to a better climate. So that gives you another example of what we do around reporting, but it actually backs into some of the change that needs to happen and all the work associated with getting different parts of a supply change that also change their behaviors.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah. So reporting is much broader than what I had imagined. I was thinking you are talking about disclosures in financial annual reports and helping companies produce sustainability reports, which are all sort of public facing. But you're doing a lot of work in reporting that are also B2B to help companies communicate with their buyers to meet their requirements, it sounds like.

Jen Steinmann:
Absolutely. We do a lot of what you were sharing as well around assurance. It's key to the business. As you get into the topic of climate, a lot of this starts at the front end as we've been talking about in terms of strategy. Many of the conversations start with trying to get a better understanding of policy. So it's all important to the outcome ultimately. But to your point, this kind of work can lead from the back end back into how do you impact supply chains and operations and finance, which is very important.

Mike Toffel:
So we've talked about examples with companies, which I think is probably your bread and butter work, whether it's a fast food company or oil and gas or Cargill and the ag sector, you've also mentioned you work with government agencies. I think you do some work with NGOs, right? Can you talk a little bit about an example of a project in this climate and sustainability space with a nonprofit?

Jen Steinmann:
Sure. I'm really proud of the work that we do with non-profits and non-government organizations. A lot of the time, I see that work as leading in terms of what we might be doing next with our for-profit clients. So it's not an isolated action. one example is the World Wildlife Fund where we've been working with them to combat deforestation. A little bit of context around that, over the last several decades, more than half of Indonesia's, as an example, tropical forests have vanished mainly due to palm oil cultivation, gold mining, logging, creation of irritable land. To preempt further deforestation, we've been working with the World Wildlife Fund and a consortium of private entities to develop a tool that predicts deforestation through automated assessment of spectral satellite imagery and other geospatial data.

When you put something like that together, then you can see automatically how you might apply that to other commercial aspects. So while it's incredibly important for the work that we're doing from an in-kind perspective, we also see application outside of that as well. But the first phase of the pilot ran from 2020 onwards on part of an island in Borneo. There was a huge amount of data. And we started using AI for this. We migrated from the initial prototype to a cloud native scalable configuration. This allowed us to cut a lot of the data processing time from 12 to four hours, speed up our predictions, and really look at the entire proof concept island of Borneo.

Much of the input consisted of pixelated spectral, satellite imagery. And in order to generate the predictions, our AI algorithm ask a certain set of questions for all of the pixels and the landscape. And so the task really was one where pretend you're a random spot within a vast Borneo rainforest, ask yourself the question, how likely will deforestation be to occur here? Assess is deforestation happening close to me, how close is the nearest town, is it an illegal logger, and how can they transport wood over those roads or easily build a logging roll road and can palm oil be processed nearby. And so we have the machine working on helping us with all of that information and take the resulting predictions into a visualized web application accessible to local government officials and other partners.

We ran a pilot in Gabon as well, looking at rangers who have actually visited specific sites, confirming whether or not the predictions have come through. And then this allowed them to make targeted interventions on the ground. So this work we've done in a couple of areas now, and we've been able to predict deforestation in at least five different sites, which allows us to then lay the groundwork for preservation of ancient tropical rainforests in close collaboration with governments.

It's a little bit humbling to be in this business when we get the opportunity to work on so many examples like this. We're doing an effort right now with the World Economic Forum focused on one aspect of natural capital, which is farming. We've been working with them on looking at how we help decarbonization in the farming industry and think through the value chain landscape. But if you think about it in terms of what I was sharing around our purpose driven work, it is incredibly important as we look at this to think about making an impact that matters. And if we can take this work that we're doing from a pro bono basis and then work with our alliance partners, our clients in the marketplace, ultimately it also will serve the purpose of generating revenue.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah, these projects sound like a great opportunity for your folks to learn from their NGO partners and from the clients that are being served, in this case, government officials.

Jen Steinmann:
Absolutely.

Mike Toffel:
Yeah. It's very interesting. So let's take this up a level. How do you and your colleagues characterize this work given there's lots of other professional service firms also entering this space? How do you describe the differentiation that Deloitte offers?

Jen Steinmann:
We seek to help our clients navigate the enormous complexity of both climate risk as well as broader sustainability issues. there's the questions around what must we do, how do we navigate the complex regulatory environment, what can we do, what should we do. Is it an offense play? A defense play? And then once you sort through those first few questions, how do you get it all done?

So as I think about our competitive differentiator, we can take a holistic view from the perspective of our clients. So we've been talking about that a lot, strategy, operations, finance, reporting, many organizations are focused on slices of it. When I came into this, one of the things that we realized is that there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace. And so trying to crystallize what the definitions of different terms are, what they mean, how do you think about this from top of the house in the boardrooms into the C-suite all the way through the work that an organization needs to do on a day to day basis, that's really where we see our differentiator.

One of the things that's been implied in our conversation as well is an industry lens. And so we have deep industry expertise that we can bring to this. It actually gets much more complicated once you get into solving the hard problems at an industry level and decomposing a supply chain. we have deep technical capabilities and solutions that we bring into the marketplace to support the transformation that organizations need to make

Mike Toffel:
Interesting. So that's a whole lot of differentiation with the end to end approach, the multi-functional areas, and the global footprint, at least a few of the issues that I'm hearing there.

Jen Steinmann:
For sure. I think thought leadership comes into play too. So we've been really focused on not just publishing and publicizing for the sake of publishing, but really thinking through what can we contribute. And so we recently published, and have been across the course of the last year, a series of reports called the turning point reports which really looks at the economic up and downside of acting around climate change. And so taking those estimations around what is the downside of not acting now over the course of the next 50 to 70 years versus the upside. And then starting to decompose that into geographies and industries really helps make it much more tangible for our clients to see from a data-driven perspective versus, let's call it vitriol, what one might do to help shape a strategy.

Mike Toffel:
So as you're growing this team, can you talk a bit about the types of talents and skills you're looking to bring in? This is sort of leading to a broader question about for those who want to work in the business and climate space, what career advice do you have for them? How do they get tooled up? How do they think about entering this area?

Jen Steinmann:
So the first part of your question, as we've been talking you can start to see the breadth and depth of the kinds of things that we need. You mentioned up front the languages. So you need the language. You need the language of climate, you need the language of business. You need an understanding of design thinking that comes together to make change happen and understanding of policy.

One of the things we've been talking about is the need to go beyond organizations' boundaries to collect that expertise. So we are in a similar position in the sense that we are looking at traditional hires. We're also looking to upskill our traditional hires so that they better understand this and then can apply the discipline that they do get really strong at with this as well. And then we're looking for deep subject matter experts who also can help with the deep domain expertise as well as things like tax and risk and financial advisory. So all of those things are really important all around the globe.

And then the second part of your question, I really applaud and welcome those that want to and are thinking about dedicating their careers to addressing and mitigating climate change. It's an incredible time to get into this part of the world. The intersection of capitalism and altruism I actually think are really there and cross pollinate with one another. And so from a Deloitte perspective, we see a lot of the concerns and shifting expectations. We've got a lot of millennials and Gen Z in our population now, and that makeup of the majority of our workforce. And so for people looking to get into this, I think understanding where their current strengths are, if there's an industry lens or a technology lens, or even understanding different components of what we were talking about in terms of strategy all the way through the reporting, find some anchor that you already have where you have a strength to get into this business and build on that.

I would also say there's not necessarily one set path to building that career in climate, so looking for those opportunities. I will say that I get requests probably three or four times a week from people within Deloitte that are looking to cross over into this area. Every single one of them is eagerly weighted so that we can make the match with other parts of our business and help get them connected. Similarly, resumes coming in from the outside, some with experience, some just want to get into it. There's a very strong demand for this kind of interest and experience right now.

Mike Toffel:
And the role of MBA skills. You yourself have an MBA. I know there's a bunch of MBAs and recent graduates who are eager to get into this space. What do you see the role for the folks who have this general sort of analytical approach to understanding the various aspects of business, how do they plug into a career in this space?

Jen Steinmann:
It's interesting because I was thinking about this over the last few days and I came from French literature, political science background prior to getting my MBA. While I had done work for a couple banks and several stints outside of the US, I felt the need to get an MBA, to really broaden my understanding of business writ large. And so I think part of the answer to your question is how did you come into it and why are you there. But I think that MBA, when in particular you start working through cases, the lens within which we work from a professional services perspective, is a bit that way. You're going in, you're a diagnostician, you're trying to understand what the client is trying to achieve and helping them get to that answer and the first question might not be the only question. And so you're asking more, you're inquisitive, you're calling upon others in your network to help solve those problems because one of the things we know about these problems is you don't solve them on your own.

So I think an MBA really actually does lend itself to this. Most MBAs have a specific area that they're exploring during those several years. And so that creates their domain expertise. And then the rest of the time they're looking for those general management skills that allow them to ask the right questions and inquire and be curious and constantly looking to make connections where there seemingly aren't. So I think This business lends itself to that.

Mike Toffel:
Terrific. Well, Jen, it's been a pleasure to speak with you. Once again, thank you so much for joining us here on Climate Rising.

Jen Steinmann:
Thank you, too. It's really been a pleasure speaking with you and I appreciate the time with you today.