Two Steps Forward — Sustainability Meets Business Reality

What does it take to start a career in sustainability today — when the field is more established, but the expectations are higher than ever? In this episode, we speak with three early-career professionals about breaking in, building influence and navigating the realities of corporate sustainability. It’s a candid, hopeful and occasionally sobering conversation about what’s changed, what hasn’t and what sustainability elders can do to support — and learn from — the next generation.

Recorded live at the GreenBiz 26 conference in February, this episode of Two Steps Forward features Dylan Siegler, head of sustainability at Universal Music Group. Siegler discusses how the music industry’s greatest sustainability impact may come not from reducing emissions, but from influencing billions of fans through culture and storytelling. The conversation explores sustainable merch, artist advocacy, fandom as a force for behavior change, and the growing importance of “handprint” impact alongside traditional corporate footprint metrics.

For much of the past decade, corporate sustainability has been absorbed into the machinery of management — metrics, disclosures, target-setting and compliance. Necessary work, certainly. But something essential has been lost along the way: the idea that sustainability is fundamentally about invention.

That thread runs through the latest episode of Two Steps Forward, in which we talk with Liz Minné, who heads  global sustainability strategy at Interface, the floorcovering giant.

Interface remains instructive not because it is perfect or singular, but because it demonstrates what happens when sustainability becomes part of a company’s identity rather than a program. Over time, that identity attracts employees, shapes culture and builds customer loyalty — reinforcing itself in ways no disclosure requirement can mandate.

For all the noise surrounding climate — the backlash, the culture wars, the political theatrics — here’s an uncomfortable truth: most Americans haven’t changed their minds at all.

That’s the quiet bombshell from our recent podcast conversation with Yale’s Anthony Leiserowitz, founder and director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Despite a second Trump administration openly attacking climate science and policy, despitecorporate retreat and the rise of “climate hushing,” public concern about climate change in the United States has remained remarkably stable.
Which raises an obvious question: Ifthe public hasn’t moved, why has business?

The answer, he told us, has less to do with ideology than imagination. Or rather, a failure of it.

In this episode, we talked about Solitaire's remarkable new novel — but the most useful part of the conversation wasn’t about the book’s alternative Roman Empire or its sword-wielding heroine. It was about what writing fiction taught her about what makes any story actually work.

Solitaire’s biggest takeaway is deceptively simple: Stories are not about issues, they are about people. Not systems, trends, frameworks or even impacts.

People.

That sounds obvious, until you look closely at most sustainability communications. We routinely aspire to tell stories when we’re actually merely presenting information: emissions trajectories, regulatory developments, technology roadmaps, ESG metrics.

All are important. Most are necessary. And little of it, on its own, is storytelling.