John Schulz, Director, Sustainability Integration, AT&T

The climate is changing. At AT&T, they are using their size, talent and technology to help mitigate and adapt to climate change. And by taking these actions they are, in turn, helping build a better, more environmentally sustainable world.

AT&T’s current sustainability program began with the naming of its first Chief Sustainability Officer in 2008.  The first team was small and focused on working with internal stakeholders to, among several goals, reduce the company’s impact on the environment.  Over time, the scope of the program grew tremendously to address both environmental and social concerns and was renamed the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) group.  The CSR group incorporated many functions including reporting, employee engagement, and social programs.  When AT&T bought DirectTV and WarnerMedia, the group’s responsibilities expanded again to incorporate media and telecom issues including the commitment to diversity and inclusion as moral and business imperatives, responsible content development, green sets, and the protection of human rights in entertainment. 

The AT&T Sustainability Integration team is a division of the CSR group and is responsible for managing the company’s electric, waste, and fleet carbon footprints as well as the customer solutions team that help customers use AT&T’s technology to increase efficiencies and advance their own sustainability goals. 

What do you actually do all day?

My primary focus is on driving our progress towards our public goal of enabling our customers to save 10 times the footprint of our operations by 2025.  We call this our “10x Goal”, and we’re doing it by working with our customers to deploy AT&T technology that can help reduce their GHG emissions, save water, and reduce waste.  

I was heavily involved in developing that goal which we announced in 2015.  We wanted to develop a sustainability goal that communicated our vision and dedication to the impact that our technology can have for our customers.  We also wanted to ensure that our goal was quantitative and based in reliable research.  We used the Smart2020 report (updated to the new SMARTer2030 report) from the Global Enabling Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) which clearly demonstrated the enormous impact that utilizing technology such as cloud, mobility, and network could have on reducing our customers’ GHG emissions. 

Most of my day is spent working with our customers to identify and highlight the many ways they are using our technology to reduce their electricity, fuel, water, and materials consumption.  We’re documenting and publishing as many case studies as we can to help our customers understand the full potential behind these solutions. 

One of my favorite examples of our work is AT&T’s Energy Building Management System (EBMS).  If you have a diverse real estate portfolio, you likely have a wide variety of building management systems (BMS) installed across your portfolio.  This can make monitoring and reporting difficult since the different systems collect different levels of data and not every system is capable of monitoring every piece of equipment that you may want to manage.  Our product layers on to whatever system you may already have in place and pulls the data from the existing system and puts it into the cloud for easy aggregate reporting.  It can also connect with additional sensors to collect and report data about fans, alarms, or chillers that may not be monitored by the existing BMS. 

This is incredibly helpful because it allows you to then utilize a centralized, automated alarming system that can create a service ticket when equipment is performing out of range.  It gives service technicians detailed information so they know exactly what is wrong and how to fix it, right when something happens.  It’s also really powerful because it allows portfolio owners to see their building performance in aggregate, compare buildings, and get data in real time.  That results in big environmental savings because learning about a problem right when it happens reduces the amount of wasted energy or water associated with equipment that’s not performing as expected. 

I also love that our solutions can help businesses reduce expenses to the point that new business models become possible.  For example, Emerson was developing a service called Grind2Energy to help eliminate food waste.  They created a system for commercial kitchens that included a heavy-duty food grinder and large holding container for the resulting slurry.  Once the container was full, it was emptied onto a truck and taken to an anerobic digester and turned into biogas and fertilizer.  Different customers filled the tank at different rates.  Someone from Emerson had to regularly come on site to see how full the tank was and check that the system was operating correctly.  This model was prohibitively expensive. So, they came to AT&T for a solution.  We worked with them to add sensors and connectivity that provided real-time measurements of tank level and the status of maintenance issues so that the number of site visits was reduced dramatically.  This brought the cost of the service down to the point where it was competitive with traditional waste haulers.  Now when they approach a new customer, they’re offering a service that reduces the impact of food waste while keeping their costs at or less than what the customer is currently paying a traditional waste hauler.  That’s an incredibly compelling opportunity. 

Emerson’s Grind2Energy system

Solutions like these are enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Emerson story is a great example of how IoT is using information to fundamentally change the revenue potential or cost burden of a product.  The cost of sensors and connectivity are getting lower all the time and our ability to provide highly secure, ubiquitous, accurate and granular data is getting better every day.  The result is some interesting new business cases that can make a big difference in reducing our impact on the environment. 

What are some of the key skills for success in this role?

It’s very important to know how the business works, speak the language of the business, and to do a lot of internal networking.  At a big company like AT&T, just being able to understand the organization and who to talk to and what motivates the different groups is a big part of how things get done. 

Communication skills are also critical.  You need to really know your audience and use language that resonates with them.  That’s especially important when you’re asking another team for information so you can do external reporting.

Technical knowledge is also useful, but this role is mostly about working effectively with people.  We have some members of our team that have specific reporting or energy analysis skills but as you move forward in your career, a good business acumen and people skills are key. 

What is your favorite part of your job?

I love winning.  I love it when we successfully deliver a case study, or when I tell my story publicly and people are excited about the things we’re doing.  It’s great when someone says “Wow, I had no idea AT&T was doing all these things.”  I really love it when we successfully deliver for our customers and can show measurable progress and communicate the success stories. 

It’s important to celebrate all those wins because you get a lot of “nos” for every “yes”. So, you have to savor it. 

What is the hardest part of your job?

You need perseverance to fight through all the “nos” to get to the “yes.”  It’s hard because I love my job, and you’ve got to keep at it even when there’s a big “no.”  Getting a case study across the finish line is a lot of work. There are a lot of stakeholders involved, and there are a lot of twists and turns in the road to sharing these stories publicly. 

What is your proudest professional achievement?

I’m very proud of my role in setting our 10x goal.  It was bold and for a company like AT&T to make that kind of public commitment was a game changer for our group.  Getting a goal like that approved requires a lot of stakeholder and executive engagement and a lot of work goes into getting people comfortable with it.  It took a lot of vision to quantify, promote, and accelerate how our customers think about technology as part of their sustainability plan, and I’m excited that we’re so focused on that. 

What are the game changers in your world? 

For our industry, it’s the advent of 5G.   It’ll eventually deliver high-capacity and low-latency performance that will be a game changer.  We expect to be able to provide customers with access to highly secure, reliable, fast data.  It’ll enable things like the use of AI or augmented reality for training for professional services or for preventative maintenance routines.  Those kinds of fast, highly secure connections will open the doors to impactful new products and services, some of which we don’t even know about yet!

What was your path to this role?

I started with a liberal arts degree in Political Science and German and found myself answering phones as a Lotus 123 tech support representative out of college.  While I didn’t love that job, it gave me valuable computer and spreadsheets skills, which weren’t common skills back then.  I then went back for my MBA at the University of Texas and focused on technology and business. 

After my MBA, I worked for a series of tech startups and wound up working in the real estate group for the phone company.  It was a true blessing in that it opened my eyes to the environmental impact of buildings.  I saw An Inconvenient Truth when it came out and started reading more about sustainability.  Then in 2007 I started pitching the idea of incorporating more sustainability work into my role at AT&T.  My manager was a wonderful champion, and although I didn’t get the Chief Sustainability Officer role I was aiming for, I was able to start working exclusively on our carbon footprint for three years.  I got certified through the GHG Management Institute and got LEED AP certified, and then started working on energy efficiency projects.  After that I got pulled over to the corporate sustainability group and did work on reporting across all the business units, supply chain, and fleet.  I started getting invited to conversations with our clients about how they could improve their sustainability efforts and that led to the role I’m in now.   

What’s your advice to someone interested in a role like this?

Don’t look for a job that has the word ‘sustainability’ in the title, there aren’t very many of those.  Wherever you are, find a way to integrate sustainability into what you’re doing.  If you’re in procurement, start asking about integrating environmental questions into the vendor selection process.  If you’re a seller, look for ways that your products could be used to help your customers meet their sustainability goals.  Wherever you are, try to weave sustainability into what you do already.  You’ll have to get creative.  Even if it’s just starting a green team or contributing to one outside of the capacity of your formal role, do something, get started. That experience will give you something to talk about if you ever get a chance to interview for one of those jobs with “sustainability” in the title.

Remember that you can be a champion within a business unit and support the CSR efforts without formally being on the team.  The CSR folks will love having your help as they’re always looking for champions in the business units.  In fact, most people that have come into our group have come from the business units and usually started as volunteers or reporters from the business units. 

What are your favorite resources?

Please note that neither John Schulz nor AT&T endorse the below organizations.  These resources are shared in the interest of helping our readers to identify sources for learning more about sustainable business practices.  

The Global Enabling Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) supports sustainability work driven by technology.  They publish their research in reports such as the SMARTer2030 report that is really helpful. 

I love GreenBiz for news.

I use the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator regularly.

The US Energy Information Administration provides a lot of great macro level data on energy trends.

Who (or what) is your sustainability hero? 

I really admire Seth Goldman, who founded the Honest Tea company and is now working on Beyond Meat.  It’s well known that reducing meat consumption can be a big part of a low-carbon economy, but it’s hard to ask people to give something up for the cause.  Creating a product that reduces emissions but still gives people the satisfaction of a juicy burger is the proverbial “win-win” scenario, and those are the types of changes we need.  I like that Seth is using food to be part of the solution and not just the problem.  He really embodies what you need to be like in order to drive change – charismatic, super smart, ambitious, and highly successful.