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Tardigrade carbon backbone8/26/2023 “Wow, I feel sorry for those people because they are small minded and can’t see the bigger issue.” At first, she said that it hurt her, but as we explored further, I got the sense thatit disappointed her, it made her sad for them and disheartened. “It hurts when people are going after things for their own self-interest.”, she said. We had an interesting conversation around this question. Q: Does it hurt when others say negative things about you? I love watching the antagonist become the protagonist.”, she again chuckled at herself. She then offered that she “really gets fired up watching others take my ideas and go. I am not a leader, I’m an instigator.” She says she doesn’t want accolades, and in fact, those typically come accompanied by “people trying to tear you down”. She said the burden of leadership is “being looked at as a leader. She explains that she also works to create “shiny moments”, which she operationally defined as giving people deliverables that become a “platform to succeed, to win.” Q: What are some of the surprising burdens of leadership?Įrin’s answer here was very different. What if we could solve this? What if we made this change? She helps them to see the future state and understand the potential. She uses questions to help people have those “What if” experiences. “I just don’t want to live in that pessimistic world.” She added that “Sometimes being an optimist is viewed as weak, but that is not the case.” She credits both her optimism and her understanding of Appreciative Inquiry with helping her learn how to ask the right questions that motivate others. I am not naive, I am just goal oriented.”, she laughs. Peoplesometimes think that I am so optimistic that I am naive. But that is Erin, as she says, “I am an optimist, I own it. Q: What have you learned about connecting with people?Įrin mentioned that she has studied “Appreciative Inquiry”, which to offer an overly simplified definition, is basically asking the questions about what is working versus our default of asking about what is not. She said that one of her greatest take aways from the experience wasrealizing, “You can pick up the phone and talk to whomever you want.” Yep, I’d say that her courage is hardwired. “I just wanted to do the right thing and felt students deserved a better education.” She did add one other interesting point to this story. “I had coalesced a group of high school principals to create the high school of the future.” She laughed because she recognized that this was not the typical high school story. I believe in putting yourself in situations that stretch you.” She then went on to tell me a story from her high school days. “You’re only as good as what you are driving towards. She didn’t answer this question specifically, but I sense it is just hardwired into her DNA. She went silent for a moment and then added, “It just bothers me.” Q: Where do you find the courage? With irony dripping from her words, and with tangible anger in her tone, she went on to share that she just can’t understand how we can “value Facebook’s IPO at $7 billion and we can’t value the roughly 3-4 billion people who can’t eat”. While most of us might take home the banal stressors of the office, Erin “thinks about food security quite a bit, and that agriculture, and feeding people and feeding them well is the backbone of society”. She went on to explain that the United States is losing a significant amount of farmland each year, and she thinks “that's our rainforest”. Erin responded passionately to this question, saying that she is “really worried aboutthe state of farming globally”. Well, it did not take long for that fierce determination mentioned above to percolate to the surface. I thought it was important to include Erin in this series because she is an accomplished leader who leads not from authority or position, but rather, by passion, and purpose. She lead an effort that has delivered meaningful change that will have a lasting, and positive impact on our environment. Over the past eight years, this soft-spoken, but fiercely determined woman galvanized a disparate group of farmers, manufacturers, academics, and NGO’s. Erin was just a few years removed from Notre Dame and was charged with leading the industry’s response. That is where I first met Erin Sexson, Senior Vice President of Global Sustainability for the Center. Dairy’s Sustainability Council back in 2008. It was that question that lead me join the Innovation Center For U.S. What do Vacuums, DVDs, and Dairy have in common? The answer is Walmart, and more specifically, its interest in understanding the carbon footprint of those three industries.
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