Bruno Sarda - VP Sustainability at NRG Energy
Bruno Sarda is head of sustainability at NRG, one of the country’s leading power companies, where he leads the development and execution of company-wide sustainability strategy and initiatives. Named one of the ‘most influential sustainability voices in America’ by The Guardian, Sarda actively participates in a variety of cross-industry efforts bridging public and private entities. Sarda joined NRG from Dell, Inc. where he was director of sustainability and social responsibility.
Bruno Joins Sustainable Nation to Discuss:
Sustainability initiatives of a large power company
Renewable energy and carbon capture technology
SASB's role in corporate sustainability
Advice and recommendations for sustainability leaders
Bruno's Final Five Question Responses:
We're going to end with our final five questions. What is one piece of advice you would give other sustainability professionals that might help them in their careers?
You have to quickly get comfortable with the fact that sustainability is not the goal .Sustainability is the way. Tie is to the mission. Understand what is the organization trying to do. How does it define success? Show them that sustainability is an unavoidable or better path to go achieve that. Don't make sustainability its own objective. As long as you do that, you start getting a lot more support internally.
What are you most excited about right now in the world of sustainability?
We touched on that all these ESG movement in the capital markets and the money flows where you look at where all the new money that's going, whether it's from a equity investors or debt lenders, it's all being invested in the right things. Everything else is noise or public money going into the wrong things. I find it very exciting to see that the capital markets are pointed in the right direction.
What is one book you would recommend sustainability professionals read?
A book that I assigned to my students at Arizona State is The Big Pivot by Andrew Winston. Andrew is a great guy. It's a well structured book that touches on the what's, the why's and the how's. Through the lens from a corporate sustainability view more than anything. It's very useful to anybody who wants to be successful in this space.
What are some of your favorite resources or tools that help you in the work that you do?
There's a handful. There's such an information overload. I find the Corporate Eco Forum puts out a weekly, very well curated digest. It's a Monday morning religiously at about 8:00 AM Eastern. It's free even to non members. If you subscribed to that, you get a weekly dose of very well curated sustainability news if that's all you get to read, you read that. For years now have also worked with BSR Business for Social Responsibility in terms of access to expertise. I find that they're a great partner and they put out also a lot of new knowledge and content and reports for a non members as well, but anybody can consume peer to peer learning. Mentoring is a important part of sustainability since often there's only a handful of us in any one company doing this job.
We're members of the GreenBiz Executive Network. That's a good resource for peer to peer connections and collaboration. The last one I'll mention that's newer for us, but very exciting. We're using a tool called Beta Moran, which is an AI-powered platform to help us streamline our sustainability work. We're about to do a big refresh of our materiality for NRG. For the first time, we're going to use it using this platform instead of using a people power.
Where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the work that you're leading at NRG?
It's www.NRG.com/sustainability. You'll find everything you need to know about what we're doing here. If you're also interested in what I'm doing on the ASU, you can go to www.sustainability.ASU.edu. I'm on LinkedIn. It's www.linkedin.com/in/brunosarda. I'm Twitter @bruno68.