Achieving Net Zero as a Competitive Advantage: A Conversation with Marriott’s Denise Naguib and Salesforce’s Patrick Flynn

Michael Rivo: Welcome back to Blazing Trails. I'm your host, Michael Rivo from Salesforce studios. Earth Day is this week. So today we're celebrating with an inspiring conversation about how businesses can become climate advocates. So why is this conversation so inspiring? Well, it gave me insight into how companies are using their influence with each other behind the scenes to drive positive change in the climate crisis. I didn't realize how much data is being collected by companies about climate impacts already and how these data can be used as levers or change agents in conversations between suppliers and customers pushing each other to get better in this area. And when you think about it, this is where the rubber meets the road in making an impactful change across so many industries at scale, and our two guests today are leading the charge in this effort. Denise Naguib is vice- president for sustainability and supplier diversity at Marriott International, where she leads their sustainability and social impact platform focused on responsible sourcing, reducing waste, and increasing spend with diverse businesses globally. Welcome Denise.

Denise Naguib: Thank you so much, Michael. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Michael Rivo: And Patrick Flynn is vice president of sustainability for Salesforce. He's responsible for defining and overseeing the execution of Salesforce's, environmental strategy. Welcome Patrick.

Patrick Flynn: Oh, I'm so excited to be here and thanks Denise for joining us as well.

Denise Naguib: Thank you, Patrick.

Michael Rivo: Great. Having both of you as leaders in this industry, I'm curious about your personal journeys into this world and this work. Maybe Denise, can you just tell us how you got here? What was your journey into this?

Denise Naguib: Well, I was born in Cairo, Egypt, Michael. So you wouldn't think that that was sort of a natural path for somebody who is born in one of the biggest and probably one of the more polluted cities in the world, but I had the good fortune of moving to Oregon at one point in my childhood, and if anyone knows anything about Oregon, they know it's full of environmentalists. So I got surrounded by a lot of them instantly and one of the ones I remember most was my fourth grade teacher, Ms. Boyorski who had us write letters to the governor. I remember we lived in the Willamette Valley and driving to the coast and seeing just the hillsides of... The coastal range, I should say, completely decimated in terms of logging. It was just major clear- cut. So I wrote the letter to the governor about clear- cutting and I got a letter back. Obviously his staffer at the time, I'm sure, wrote me back, but I just remember being so excited as a kid about that and just being like, I did something. I signaled something to someone, but candidly, I was actually a pre- med student into my third year of university. So I was definitely not on a path at all of sustainability, but I took a class. So kind of another nod to education and the influence that or teachers have. I had one class, it was tropical ecology, Southeast Asia and it was during a time when there was massive deforestation in Borneo. There was a hole in the ozone. It woke me up to this isn't right. Something's got to give. There was no sustainability degree at the University of Oregon where I went at the time. So I was in the geography department and put together some classes to make up a degree that I ended up graduating with, but ultimately shortly thereafter went into environmental education and documentary film with Jean Michel- Cousteau and one thing led to another. After a decade with Cousteau, I implemented a Cousteau project in the Cayman Islands at the Ritz-Carlton there and I've been with Ritz- Carlton Marriott ever since. So the worlds came colliding, but it was certainly not planned.

Michael Rivo: Well, that's quite a journey to get there. The Cousteau experience sounds amazing. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Denise Naguib: So I worked for... Jean Michel-Cousteau's the son of Jacques Cousteau and he and Dr. Richard Murphy, who was my boss for a long time, ran these environmental programs mostly for adults before I got involved. Then we had an opportunity to develop this environmental education program out on Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California for fourth through 12th graders at the time, to help them understand the value of nature and it was all focused on systems ecology. How does the natural ecosystem function as a sustainable community? Where do we get energy from? How do we deal with our waste? Why is biodiversity important? How are things connected? So we used this model of systems ecology to take these kids out into nature and not teach them the names of fish, but teach them how these ecosystems functioned as a sustainable community and then apply those lessons to the human community. How do we, as humans learn from nature? How do we make these connections across? Why is it important to have doctors and garbage collectors in the same community? You can't have everybody do the same thing, and that was the program that we had out on Catalina. There was the Ritz- Carlton in Cayman Islands that was being built, got wind of the project through a piece that we did on The Finding Nemo DVD. I heard about the project, got excited, invited us to go check out the project and that's how the two parts got connected. So today there are Jean Michel- Cousteau ambassadors of the environment programs at several Ritz-Carltons around the world that you can go and experience as adults or families or kids where you can get those same experiences of being in nature and understanding the connections that we have to nature.

Michael Rivo: Fantastic. Patrick, how did you get here today?

Patrick Flynn: Tough act to follow. So what we share is an accidental arrival at sustainability. I studied engineering undergrad and coming out of school, I got a job designing buildings, high rise buildings, HVAC systems and I got to see firsthand how badly we design our buildings, especially back then. Thinking about short- term profit maximization for the developer, as opposed to long- term value creation for society and it was, and in many ways still is this huge disconnect. I felt an obligation as someone who was front and center to that to try to fix it. I got captivated almost intellectually at first about why is this so broken? Where is the information not getting exchanged properly? Why are the incentives so misaligned and then found more of the moral reason and the imperative to do it and a sense of responsibility grew and grew from there. My journey then went to clean tech venture capital. I led sustainability for a data center company for a while and here at Salesforce for a bit, but for a while now, it's been really that my only career goal is maximum cumulative lifetime impact on climate change, and that is the goal. It means a career that may have really different and varied stops on it. A lot like yours, Denise, where the objective is actually very stable, but how you affect the change that you're after looks very different. So I think we probably share a bit of that as well.

Michael Rivo: Denise, tell me a little bit about sustainability in the hospitality industry. How are you thinking about this right now?

Denise Naguib: Well, sustainability in hospitality is a really big area of focus because it's not like we're making a widget. We're really providing and creating experiences for all kinds of different guests as they come through our doors. So as we think about that, we really are really touching guests along the entire travel journey. So everything, obviously carbon is the most critical of the sustainability elements as we talk about today, but water of course is very much there. We're talking about responsible sourcing. We feed guests all the time in our hotels. So thinking about what is that we feed them or provide them as products to consume, to engage with, whether it's the bedding that they're using when they sleep or the coffee that they're drinking, all of those elements really touch on our world of sustainability. It also expands into the communities. How are we being good corporate citizens in the communities that we operate with 7, 500 plus hotels in 130 plus countries? It matters how we behave and how we show up in communities around the world. So as we think about sustainability, it really touches on both the environmental and social aspects of how we operate in those communities.

Michael Rivo: Have you seen a big change now with so much change in the industry post pandemic? What changes are you seeing right now?

Denise Naguib: Obviously, the pandemic had a pretty significant impact on our industry, starting with Asia and then as it moved across the globe. We're seeing those green shoots come out in other places, in terms of people starting to come back, especially in some of the Asian markets, some places in the middle East and so on. I think some of the changes from a sustainability perspective might've gone the wrong way, candidly. We obviously, with a lot of sensitivity to cleanliness, a lot of people were dependent on single use product delivery. A lot more chemicals and cleaning of products and experience spaces, guestrooms, et cetera. So some of those things, candidly are challenging from a sustainability perspective because we had to come back from that. We were making some significant progress on a lot of these areas as a sector and within our own company, and understandably, safety first, cleanliness was and still is such a priority in terms of dealing with this pandemic. So it was really important to deal with that, but think about the masks. We're all using so many more masks. So just the disposal of that. So I think waste is an area that has skyrocketed in terms of the impact. On the other side of it, carbon obviously has gone down tremendously as our hotels were closed or have much lower energy footprints because we don't have as many people and as much usage for the hotel. So there's some things that were benefited by the impacts of the pandemic. Other things like water that went the other way around and we're using more water per occupied room than previously.

Michael Rivo: You can see how interconnected all of it is and Patrick, we were talking a little bit about how companies are working together on this issue and partnering together to work on that. If you look at your example, Denise, around masks, there's the company that's producing the masks and then you're purchasing the masks. Then how do you dispose of the mask and everything, if you expand that out is so interconnected. How are companies thinking about this with each other? Are there conversations happening around that, Patrick?

Patrick Flynn: I think the customer relationship is going to end up being the key to climate action, the key to sustainability as all of our sustainability programs move past our operational footprint into, in carbon accounting language, into Scope 3. It is by definition a customer relationship challenge. You're either talking about downstream customer behavior, engaging with those customers. That's obvious, but upstream, when you're talking to your suppliers, when you're reshaping your supply chain, that's also a customer relationship. You're using your own customer voice with your suppliers and trying hopefully to be really clear about what your own objectives are and how they can help you on that journey. So this bridge that Denise and I build between each other, where we are each other's customers and where we aim to be as clear as possible about what we want from each other, for our own climate and sustainability objectives, it's critical. I think it's the next frontier of where some of the biggest innovation, the biggest collaboration, the biggest breakthroughs are going to come from in rising to meet the climate emergency that we face.

Denise Naguib: Absolutely, Patrick. I think one thing to note, just back to your earlier conversation around what happened since the pandemic hit is the increased interest by our corporate customers into sustainability, whereby there were a few select companies that were really focused on this, really engaged in the topic, wanted to figure out ways to partner like Salesforce on how do we really tackle this climate issue together. It is now sort of widespread. There are a lot more companies who have set ambitious goals over the past year on climate that are really figuring out how do they partner with their customers and their suppliers to work through some of these challenges. So I think for us, candidly, we were quite surprised given the impact on people's travel, especially corporate travel, how much more heightened awareness and activation that was happening with our biggest clients in this particular area.

Patrick Flynn: I can relate to the uptick in customer interests that you're seeing because from my vantage point, as a sustainability leader in a company where travel was a big opportunity, it went to zero overnight. It went from this thing that had all of this inertia, how to figure out how to probe it, how to wrangle it. Then it showed itself to be completely malleable. Went to zero business carried on, we found new ways of doing it and in that moment, you see this seam for opportunity to rethink it, recreate it, do better while the engine's not running. That metaphor of the difficulty of trying to change an engine in flight. This was maybe a moment where the travel engine was in the garage for a minute and we could examine it, tinker with it, and try to figure out what to do better for when it got fired up again. Actually an interesting thing, Denise, that only came to mind to me, fresh based on your most recent comments is the reverse happened as well. Meaning you found that your customers were way more interested in hospitality impacts and data from you. I found that our employees were way more interested in at- home emissions. Their food choices, their lifestyle choices, what they buy in the home. So we produced, for example, the sustainability at home guide to try to educate all of our employees about what to do better and published it for everybody to benefit from. It occurs to me that you and the hospitality industry are like the professional version of at- home sustainability. What we eat, how often we wash our sheets, whether we the lights on and off It's all of these things that we can pull at home, you guys are doing at business scale, professional scale. So a to- do list item here is we need to collaborate more on that. I need your feedback on the sustainability at home guide. I want to make it better. You're the professional eyeballs on that topic.

Denise Naguib: I love that.

Michael Rivo: Thinking about this in my own footprint, I want to know what my impact is and think about, now on my iPhone, I understand how much I'm sleeping and how many steps I get and all of this data that can open up new ways to think about, I better get out and take a walk. I better do these things, and it just has this direct impact every day, but we don't really have that for sustainability. I can guess, okay, I think this is a bigger impact or this isn't, but there's no way for me to really do that. It sounds like that's happening a little more in the corporate world where there's... And you mentioned earlier this carbon accountability in Scope 3, which I actually don't know what those things are. It might be great to define that a little bit, but where this is happening and there's more visibility into this, but before that, Denise, maybe you can talk a little bit about how Marriott is thinking about this and how you're tracking and understanding this data and using it for decision.

Denise Naguib: Absolutely. So it was probably close to a decade ago that we had the beginnings of our most progressive customers saying, " You know what? I want to know what my carbon footprint is when I travel with you. How do you help me do that? By the way, I don't want to know sort of an average number. I want to when I'm traveling to this hotel versus that hotel, what's the footprint so that I can make better decisions." So it really inspired our company and our competitors to come up with how do we do the math consistently? So we really worked together and develop what's called the Hotel Carbon Measurement Initiative, which is a free resource for anybody to use, but essentially it gave us the roadmap, the calculation, the methodology for each of us to then pull into our own world. So we took that and across the globe, all of our hotels are mandated to input information into a database. These data points, energy, water, data, condition, space of the hotel, all these attributes go in to calculate that footprint. So I can get to the granular of how much is the carbon footprint for your stay, Michael, at the hotel that you're staying at today versus a different hotel tomorrow and similarly for meetings, what is the carbon footprint for this meeting room that I'm using for four hours to host this meeting? So that really gave us some very specific information that we can leverage for our customers. So it started with a few customers asking for this information and being provided this data, but ultimately we have two paths where we give this data to customers. On the front end and the RFP process, there's a field for carbon footprint and water footprint, and we can give them by hotel what that carbon and water footprint is. So again, they can use it in whatever way makes sense for them, but ultimately for decision making on the front end. Then on the backend, based on their actual stays, we can say, " Okay, Salesforce, here are all the hotels you stayed in, here are all the room nights you spent in those hotels and therefore here's your carbon footprint with Marriott hotels across the past year." So we've been doing that reporting now twice a year to a growing number of our customers, to be able to give them the data which then goes into what's called their Scope 3 emissions accounting that Patrick can give you a little more info into, but that's essentially what we're doing is we're saying, " Here's your share of your footprint with us."

Michael Rivo: On that, do you also use that information internally to make decisions? So when you're thinking about how you manage properties, how your growth... Running the business, where does that sustainability conversation happen and is that same data being used?

Denise Naguib: Absolutely. So we have a whole sustainability and social impact platform called Serve 360: Doing Good in Every Direction and we've set out some pretty significant goals across a wide variety of topics. Carbon, water waste, food waste, responsible sourcing, and so forth. So all of these areas, we got to track, it's all about data. We don't know if we've succeeded at any of it if we don't track that information. So we have a variety of tools, but primarily this tool that we use to gather this information from the hotels is what we use to then roll up and communicate our footprint and our impact against those goals to publicly on our reporting, as well as individually to customers and so on. So there are a lot of ways we use this information across a whole bunch of topics. Like I said, food waste, responsible sourcing, water waste information in general, but also obviously to these customers and absolutely, it helps us make those decisions. So all of our hotels can have visibility to their dashboard, how well they're doing on their carbon intensity and their water intensity and their waste metrics and the environmental questions that we're asking them, how many of them have they completed to know even what they're doing in this space? So it's a really important tool, both at the individual hotel level to make those decisions and think about what's next for them, should they be getting a third party certification because we have a goal to get 100% of them certified to be able to communicate to customers, " Hey, they're holding these certifications, " and then ideas of how to do that. That way you can benchmark against each other and say, " Okay, how have you done this? How were you able to lower your footprint by 10% since last year?" Or whatever. So there are a lot of benefits, but it all starts with having that content and that data.

Michael Rivo: Is this a C- suite conversation that's happening, and is it seen as a competitive advantage and something that has real business impact?

Denise Naguib: Absolutely. So we've got our executive council who has a visibility to a scorecard around our progress against these goals on a regular basis. Like I said, we publicly disclose it, whether it's through different investor disclosures or otherwise. So there are a lot of eyeballs on the content and the goals and we absolutely know, especially at the individual customer level, we are being ranked and rated and customers are making decisions on which hotels have better sustainability attributes. Some of them are doing it softly behind the scenes. Some, they're putting it very clearly in front of their travelers to be able to have visibility to that and make those decisions. This is the competitiveness which is very important because at the end of the day, if we can all do better, we all do better.

Michael Rivo: Right. I think setting up those incentives and the competition around that is going to drive the change. All right, Patrick, carbon accountability and Scope 3. Can we just get some definitions?

Patrick Flynn: I knew it would get geeky at some point. Denise and I share a love for metrics and math and following the science, following the numbers. So brace yourselves, everybody for a moment of geekiness here.

Michael Rivo: It's going to be very exciting, very exciting here.

Patrick Flynn: We're going to delve into the fascinating world of carbon accounting, how we do the addition and subtraction and categorize carbon emissions for a company. It would be the same way you might think about doing it for your home. So there are only three scopes. Scope 1 has to do with the emissions that directly come from things you own and operate. So tailpipe emissions from an owned vehicle or the emissions from the boiler in the basement of the building. Scope 2 has to do with the indirect emissions from the purchase of things like electricity or heating or cooling. For a lot of companies, Scope 2 is almost synonymous with the emissions from electricity purchases and by the way, that's why we've seen so much corporate motivation for renewable energy targets because every company has started with Scope 1 and Scope 2 and getting their house in order. For a lot of us that oriented us towards electricity as a really material thing to tackle and pushed us into the renewable energy space. Then there's Scope 3, which is everything else. Everything else upstream, everything else downstream, all of the emissions embodied in things you purchase, for example. So for a company like Salesforce, the emissions embodied in the materials that go into fitting out our office spaces and all of the supply chain impact upstream from buying that carpeting or ceiling tile, and plenty of other examples. Ten downstream use of sold products, investment activities, the emissions associated with what happens downstream from your business. Today we're at a place where there's really no such thing as a credible climate target that does not span all of Scope 1, 2 and 3. The world needs every leading company to measure and take action with the full breadth of their full value chain impact, even if it's in collaboration and even if it can't be done alone, we all need to think about that full breadth. So that's your quick primer on Scope 1, 2 and 3. A half step back from it. It's a little bit like the wild west in greenhouse gas accounting. We've got a really solid handle out there on Scope 1 and 2. Companies have been doing it for a long time. In Scope 3, for some of these categories, the methodologies for figuring out the emissions associated with spending of a particular type or the emissions associated with downstream use of a product or service, the leaders were all still at a place where we're banding together to figure it out. We're also in the wild west in terms of most companies are doing all of this math in spreadsheets, and it's being done by very small teams, often off the side of their desk as a side project, because they know it's the right thing to do. That is so very disconnected from how important climate change is and the visibility that those teams are now having. They're being asked to present to the board of directors. They're being asked to present to the C- suite and there's this huge disconnect between how empowered they are, the quality of the data they have, the systems of records that they're using to manage this. I often think about how many financial accountants are out there in every single company and how few greenhouse gas accountants are out there in every single company. We need that metric, the ratio of financial accountants to greenhouse gas accountants to start to converge if we are going to rise to meet the climate emergency.

Denise Naguib: I think where some of this really is going to come to the direct light in terms of the financial versus the greenhouse gas accounting is when and if the SEC steps in and does require that level of scrutiny to be visible to them. So if all of a sudden there... Which is being contemplated right now. So if that happens, I think there's going to be a lot more visibility and therefore scrutiny to make sure that the rigor behind greenhouse gas accounting is equal to the financial accounting processes.

Patrick Flynn: Denise, you nailed it and at Salesforce, we recognized a handful of years ago that our greenhouse gas emissions data would need to look like the quality of our financial data very soon. So we set out to overhaul our greenhouse gas emissions, foot printing process. In layman's term, that process that most companies go through. It's sort of like doing your taxes once a year. Very boring, very tedious, looking in the rear view mirror, trying to pull records together and come up with some level numbers, and it's usually given to the least tenured person on the sustainability team. Because most of us in this field would rather be facing forward, trying to change the future than looking backwards, trying to count the beans. So anyway, we recognize that we needed the quality of this footprinting process to look investor grade and we looked around, we didn't see any systems of record that we liked out there. So we built Sustainability Cloud on the Salesforce platform, and it's now our single source of comprehensive truth for our greenhouse gas emissions footprint and Denise you're right. We're now seeing faster than any of us would have thought a few years ago, that for all companies in the EU and the UK, in the US here with the news out of the SEC, that emissions data across a company's full Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 is going to be very likely required in some form very soon. So in addition to Salesforce's technology and Sustainability Cloud aiming to empower the sustainability teams to have C- level conversations, it's also a delivery mechanism to get investor grade data out to their stakeholders in a trusted and timely fashion.

Michael Rivo: This is going to happen through the SEC, just in terms of the environment, the regulatory environment out there where this data is going to be collected. Is there anywhere else or what does this look like international? Are there other places where it's specific to environmental impact? I just don't know the landscape. What does that look like?

Patrick Flynn: There was an interesting merger announced a few months ago between the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, SASB, which for those in the finance world, aims to be the sustainability version of FASB, the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the IIRC, the International Integrated Reporting Coalition. I may have butchered that. Sorry to my friends at the IIRC. They merged to form the VRF, the Values Reporting Framework, which hopefully will be the international standard for what metrics to disclose by industry inclusive of greenhouse gas emissions data. So if you've heard about the ESG phenomenon, which is Environmental, Social and Governance disclosure phenomenon sweeping the world, this climate discussion is a piece of that.

Denise Naguib: I think that consistency of how and the need to report is going to be what keeps everybody moving forward in this space, because if it's only in a subset of one's operation, it's less likely to get the attention that it needs versus it's ubiquitously demanded, regulated, and supported in terms of doing the work. So, UK has had a carbon tax for a while, the EU's got their green deal and they're more taxation related elements that are rolling up around the world. I think given that taxation is going to be based on how much carbon you're emitting, fundamentally being able to do the math right is going to be important for the business. Nobody wants to pay more taxes than they need to. So it's going to be really important to make sure that works too.

Patrick Flynn: As much as a lot of us have our gaze set on the regulatory and compliance based reporting, I actually think coming out of our peripheral vision, there's this phenomenon with even greater speed, which is going to be the need for all companies to have their greenhouse gas emissions data be negotiation grade, to be ready for the customer conversations that are coming to them when the pressure for them to do better on climate really starts to hit the procurement table. So I think as much as the need for investor grade data is real and coming faster than we ever thought, I think this negotiation grade data that will really empower the customer relationship that we talked about earlier, that's going to be even faster to put pressure on this greenhouse gas data.

Denise Naguib: As I said, I think some customers are already there. They're already leveraging those pathways to make those decisions, at least from the travel industry perspective. Just to say, " Yes, I'm going to travel in this way and I'm going to make sure that this content is visible to my travelers and I'm going to use it as a way to make sure I'm driving more business to the right places." Others are going to look to those companies as leaders in this space and start moving in that direction, but I totally agree with you, Patrick. I think regulatory is going to come up behind and push everybody along, like the laggards, but I think the leaders in this space are certainly... They're there or they're getting there quickly.

Patrick Flynn: Yeah, and Marriott is such a leader. I just have to say. It's why I'm so excited to have you to speak with today, Denise. The quality of the data that you're able to deliver to all of your customers, stay specific data for emissions, energy, water waste, all of the ways you're able to break down the impact of choosing Marriott, it's phenomenal. I think it's the future and I think it will be, for you, a real competitive differentiator because as much as some of your customers are really focused on this topic right now, you fast forward just a few years and most of your customers are going to look like those very vocal few that you have today. So job well done.

Denise Naguib: Thanks Patrick. It's a journey we're all on it. We're trying to improve through time, of course, but I think, again, back to this idea of partnership, it is the partnership that Patrick and I and our peers at other companies have that help us move the needle in this space. We collectively understand what each other need in order to lift our own companies up and move forward in this very, very important and critical space. By doing that together with an ear to what the needs are of the other, I think it's going to only help all of us move effectively together because this is not a do it by yourself kind of effort.

Michael Rivo: I think the ability to access that data and to use it as in these conversations is so critical and something I hadn't really thought about before. Then it goes all the way down to the consumer level. I was just thinking about, I've been taking some car trips with the family and driving out here in California, we drove by a vineyard and it looks like they have a new, big wind turbine that's powering their operations at one facility. They've got the name of the vineyard on the side of it and it's kind of like a banner, like, " Hey, we're moving into the future and creating sustainable energy and going a different direction." I'd seen the same thing. These are obviously small anecdotal examples, but it seems like there's a combination of doing this work, of becoming more sustainable using new energy sources, but then also putting that out there in the world and showing people and the power and the change that that creates. Is that something you're seeing across all different industries and examples of that?

Denise Naguib: Oh, absolutely. I think everybody wants to have the label. They want to have their stamp on them to say that I am sustainable because there is a very real marketability to that more than ever. I think even just with the pandemic, so many people paused long enough to look around them. We heard story after story about people seeing the sky for the first time, people being able to breathe for the first time. These things impact individuals. They recognize and make the connections and Patrick, to your comment about the engine, everybody's paused long enough to think about the impact and the value of the natural world around them. Once you get to the heart, you can easily get to the head. People start then thinking, " Oh, okay. I need to do something about that. How do I make better decisions?" I think the challenge right now, and I think you were talking about it before Michael was around the data. That information is harder and harder to capture this idea of on your phone you know when to stand up and how many steps to take and so on. You're getting buzzed for different things to keep your personal health up. I can tell how much energy I'm producing from my solar panels on my roof, but I don't know what the carbon footprint is of the thing I'm eating for lunch. So just the, how do you get more insights not to overwhelm people, but to give people a path that they can really be able to understand the different decisions they can or should be making and make it really simple for them so that they can choose different or better paths. Yes, maybe they're going to cheat and have ice cream one day on their health path but at the other day, they're going to save on the other side and have an apple. So I think just same mentality of how do you give people enough information to make the decisions, but not overwhelm them so that they don't do anything that they're frozen in terms of action.

Patrick Flynn: We're trying to thread an incredibly tough needle with some of that because it needs to be simple and understandable, but if you get too simple or too much into marketing, you run the risk of green- washing, which is when your messaging outstrips your action. When your say/ do ratio is out of whack. When your talk doesn't match the walk. So it needs to be simple, but it also needs to be really credible. So it's almost like the tip of the iceberg needs to be these really relatable metrics or a stamp or a credential, but that iceberg had better be really deep and built on trusted data that's very comprehensive. The consumer is thankfully getting much more savvy about what credible behavior is. So it's really inspiring to see that there will be this avenue for differentiation around credible environmental, credible climate action. The B2C, the consumer relationship is the beginning, but all of those same people as they get older, as they get more senior they're in charge of B2B decisions in the businesses that they run, in the day jobs that they hold. So there's no difference really from the B2C to B2B, maybe just a little bit of a lag, but for Salesforce, as part across all of our customers, we're seeing this awakening from brands around the world that their customers, whether that's a consumer or another business, the customer is asking for more. In some ways I feel like that's the North Star. That's the orientation that these companies can have into what the future customer is going to ask of them.

Denise Naguib: You talked about it earlier, Patrick, but even from a talent perspective, your own talent, either the ones that are already part of your company or the ones that you want to attract to be part of the company, this matters to them. This is a decision point that many, many people are looking at as they start deciding where they want to start through careers, where they want to invest their lives and what companies they feel like whose values match theirs. So this is not a nice to have in any ways, it's a very much a competitive differentiator on the talent side, on the B2B relationship side, on the marketability to consumer side. I think without a doubt, there's absolutely threads throughout that are really important to make sure that we are all driving towards this. Otherwise, we're not going to have the best talent. We're not going to have the best relationships with our partners and so on.

Patrick Flynn: You touched on the pandemic slowdown for a minute and the time for everybody to take a breath and reconnect with nature, and maybe reconnect with family and friends a little bit more deeply. It brings to mind to me, just to highlight that, we're talking so much about climate action. It is the biggest, most important, most complex challenge humans have ever faced and it's not more important than equality. It is equality. It's not more important than nature and saving our natural ecosystem. It is saving nature and our natural ecosystem. Climate change and climate action is really the best, most foundational way to think about tackling anything you might be passionate about. From equality, human health, biodiversity, strength, and resilience in the economy or your business. It's this real cornerstone foundational strategy.

Denise Naguib: Even hunger. We think about some of the issues that arose through the issues of the pandemic around hunger. Well, we throw away 30% of the food we produce in this country. That's just sacrilege and the impact that that has on climate is huge. All of the resources that go into producing that food that never even makes it to feeding people at the same time that we have a hunger crisis, it's just amazing but the connections aren't often made that these two things are interlinked as an example. So I totally agree with you, Patrick. There's so much around the environmental justice piece that really does tie into that equity and equality and just making sure that we are running a society that has the ability to provide the best version of ourselves to everybody that's part of it here.

Patrick Flynn: When the environment goes wrong, it's those with the least to suffer the most. It's the most disadvantaged communities in our world that face the greatest environmental injustice. It's those who have done the least to create the climate emergency that we're in, who are going to bear the greatest burden and not to mention the injustice between those of us alive today and all future generations from whom there's this intergenerational injustice taking place right now. So climate action to me is really front and center as a way to deliver on whatever impact category you might be passionate about.

Michael Rivo: Well, Denise, Patrick, this has been a fantastic conversation. Really enlightening for me, and I hope for everybody listening. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Denise Naguib: Thank you so much, Michael and thanks Patrick for inviting me. It's a great conversation, indeed. Thank you very much.

Patrick Flynn: My pleasure. What an honor. Great to be with you. Thanks again.

Michael Rivo: That was Denise Naguib vice president of sustainability and supplier diversity at Marriott International and Patrick Flynn, vice president of sustainability at Salesforce, and there's much more at salesforce. com/ sustainability. Learn about Sustainability Cloud to track, analyze and on your company's environmental data or take our climate action trail to learn how business, government and individuals can drive climate change solutions together. Thanks again for listening. If you like this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce studios.