Maisie Ganzler is the former Chief Strategy & Brand Officer at Bon Appétit Management Company and author of the new sustainability leadership book, You Can't Market Manure at Lunchtime: And Other Lessons from the Food Industry for Creating a More Sustainable Company. She has nearly three decades of leadership experience and helped grow Bon Appétit Management Company to over $1.7 billion in annual revenue. In our latest episode, we asked Maisie for her perspective on making meaningful change in an organization and across an entire industry, and why it's important to get credit for those actions.

Incentivize sustainability action:

“Make sure that all of your systems are aligned with your sustainability commitments…for example, are people being evaluated and bonused based on your sustainability commitments? Are they being evaluated and bonused based simply on creating the lowest-cost product? Those two things are probably in conflict. So have you aligned your corporate systems to encourage everyone towards sustainability and to measure whatever it is that you're promising?” There is a lot of focus on aligning your operations to support sustainability initiatives, but she emphasizes that we shouldn’t forget the people side: it's imperative to align all your evaluation criteria to bonus structures with the overarching commitment to sustainability to ensure that every individual's actions contribute meaningfully towards your goals. 

Be radically transparent:

“I think advocates and customers often think that there's this mythical switch somewhere that if a company would just pay more, they could flip the switch and be sustainable. And it turns out that it's not that easy. Yes, money helps, but if you want to really make a change, the path is not as clear as just do this, not that….I think the more that you're transparent about that, you open up the inner workings of your company and explain to your customers and to your employees why these things are hard, you'll get more credit for them in the long run.” By shedding light on the inner workings of the company and explaining the hurdles faced, we not only garner greater understanding but also earn trust and recognition for genuine effort while avoiding equally prevalent greenhushing and greenwashing. 

Be the one to tell your story:
When it comes to telling your sustainability story, Maisie recommends taking ownership, and telling it your way: “When things go wrong…are you the first person to tell that story? [For example] When we [Bon Appétit] missed our animal welfare commitment, I put out a press release and put a blog post up on our website. Now, it turned out nobody really cared. But if they did, or if they had felt like we were hiding it, as they say, the cover-up is often worse than the crime.”

Want to hear more takeaways from Maisie? Listen to our latest podcast episode.