Joel Makower and Solitaire Townsend

Two Steps Forward — Sustainability Meets Business Reality

Business EN ↓ 31 episodes

Being a sustainable business professional is both exhilarating and terrifying. Lots of steps forward…and back. To succeed you need deep insights, real experience, lots of inspiration, maybe a few laughs. Each episode, sustainable business veterans Solitaire Townsend and Joel Makower delve into the complexities of the moment and introduce you to provocative and inspiring people you need to know.

Be sure to visit the podcast's website and support the creator: www.twostepsforwardpodcast.com

Author

Joel Makower and Solitaire Townsend

Episodes

Live from London: Unilever’s CSO on moving from vision to execution 30.06.2025 46:08

How does a corporate sustainability professional meet the moment? That’s one of the questions we posed to Unilever’s chief sustainability and corporate affairs officer Rebecca Marmot in a live-on-stage podcast recording session during this year’s London Climate Action Week. Marmot, who joined Unilever 18 years ago after stints at L’Oreal and in the U.K. government, discussed the some of the keys t...

Inside Colgate’s quest for a circular supply chain 15.06.2025 47:40

How much circularity can one company squeeze out of a toothpaste tube? That’s the mouthwatering challenge taken on by Colgate Palmolive, the iconic 220-year-old company whose chief sustainability officer, Ann Tracy, has been leading the charge to make Colgate toothpaste tubes not just recyclable, but potentially turned back into new tubes. It’s not just toothpaste, as Tracy told us. If the process...

Mastercard CSO: ‘Making more sustainable choices is a megatrend’ 02.06.2025 37:10

Financial services is high on the list of the most fascinating and challenging sectors for sustainability. Ellen Jackowski, Chief Sustainability Officer at Mastercard, is one of the sector's leaders. In just a few years at the financial services giant, she's helped pioneer approaches to using payment systems to inspire, inform and enable change at a mass scale. Jackowski talks about her co...

Paul Hawken: We have basically isolated and objectified carbon 19.05.2025 40:22

Hawken's latest book, “Carbon: The Book of Life,” explores carbon's role in living systems, not just an evil gas contributing to climate change. He criticizes the climate movement for objectifying carbon and advocates for a shift in narrative from fear to possibility. Hawken highlights the limitations of technological solutions like direct air capture and bioenergy carbon capture systems and encou...

Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr.: Let's Turn Cancer Alley into Opportunity Alley 05.05.2025 43:08

“I'm excited for this moment,” Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus, an advocacy group that works for racial, economic and climate justice, told us right off the bat. “It's a tough moment, but I'm excited for it,” he said, citing the group’s 20-year history of harnessing culture and storytelling to “shape our political experience.” In this episode of the Tw...

Google CSO Kate Brandt: This is a ‘once-in-a-career’ moment 02.05.2025 39:52

The tech giant’s chief sustainability officer reflects on how she’ll make the most of this critical time in the two decades since she’s been working to advance sustainability, in the debut episode of our biweekly podcast Two Steps Forward. Soon to celebrate 10 years at Google — preceded by sustainability leadership roles at the White House and Defense Department — Kate Brandt, the chief sustainab...