Andy Marks On Mainstreaming Environmentally Conscious Business To Build A Sustainable Future

Andy Marks Effective Visionary Leadership

Moving to Australia in 2014, Andy Mark’s many roles include Strategic Advisor for the Purpose conference, Responsible Cafes, environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht and Pixiu Podcasts, ABC’s first impact advisor (the War on Waste), originator of the Fix and Make festival and multiple advisory roles for NSW Government (Energy, Climate Change and Sustainability division).

Previously he spent eighteen years as founder and CEO of two ground-breaking UK based start-ups in content / research and circular economy product development.

Across Andy’s many endeavours, climate change and sustainability are a constant and he is highly regarded for his expertise in leadership to create positive change. Whilst his art practice decodes complex systems and the roles we do and can play in them with recent site-specific works exhibited across Sydney.

Andy discusses his unique Effective Visionary Leadership approach to guiding leaders and organisations through growth and the creation of environmentally sustainable and climate friendly business practices.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to you helping leaders and organisations create stronger climate change and sustainability outcomes?

[Andy Marks] - I will try and keep my story concise because there’s a lot I could say. I'll backtrack a little bit to my early career, where I was working in advertising in London. It's very different to how I think about the world now. I was quite fortunate to be in a very creative agency which wanted to change the markets it was working for on behalf of its clients. I got a great introduction to look at a lot of different businesses, clients, and sectors and try and understand how to use creativity to help them. There was something underlying that though; I found advertising and the advertisements themselves a bit boring. I started thinking about what more that money could do to try and serve multiple needs? Advertisers spend a lot of money, and I also had a sense that change was coming in terms of how people consume media and their choices of media. It felt like there was about to be an imminent shakeup in the media landscape, so I left to set up my own agency called A Vision. That organisation used a different model to traditional advertising agencies, as it had research, content development and experience design arms. We were trying to bring things to life and engage people in the real world. It also had a purpose through the money from advertisers being used to help enhance and make culture richer. The goal was to work with people who create cultural content like artists, filmmakers, photographers, and writers to support them in some way. We had a wide client base, but only worked with organisations who were much more engaged with the cultural space, Adidas, MTV, Sony, Disney, Royal Shakespeare Company and so on. They understood the idea of connection through culture, because a lot of their products had that link.

*Speak for the Trees* - an art installation by Andy Marks

I did that for 11 years, and it was an amazing experience for me. I was young and naive but managed to achieve quite a lot in terms of what I thought was expected of me. I got to a point where I felt like it wasn't serving me anymore and I'd done what I set out to achieve. I also felt like how I was viewing the world and what the world needed were not in alignment with that business. Also, I might have had a little inkling that at some point I'd be starting a family with my partner. I realised this wasn’t serving me and I needed to move on from this, so that's what I did.

I went through a few incarnations, supporting corporates in corporate responsibility or ‘corporate social responsibility’ as we called it back then. But then I created another start-up and that was in circular economy product development.

This was a fascinating change, because I had a breakthrough moment in a hotel in Thailand at a bar by the beach, where I was talking about waste in the businesses with the owner. She told me, "Andy, in our business, the hotel bed linen needs to be a part of the guest experience. It's great quality, but people abuse it. When it is taken to a laundry it is put under great stress, as it needs to be returned very quickly. We throw away our linen in high quantities, have you ever thought about working with bed linen?" I thought, ‘this is a great story’, and ‘what a beautiful quality material to work with.’ I investigated to see what volumes of linen might be available, and my models created by speaking to and researching the world's top 300 hotel companies concluded that in one year they discarded enough linen, that if you put it end to end next to each other it would go around the world more than twice. That's insane, so the question is what's happening to it? There are two things; one is that it’s a waste product that needs to be chucked out. At best it becomes what's called ‘down cycled’ into a low-quality product, like rags for car mechanics to use for cleaning and so on. My first product incarnation with that material was a range of premium tote bags helping to put eyes on the fact that plastic bags are something people were starting to realise we need to see the last of. I was developing premium tote bags and partnering with hotels to create them, and some of them would even sell them. But the interesting thing was they're not in the business of selling tote bags. Very quickly through that journey (the enterprise was called Sleeping Bags), we ended up co-developing ranges of products for use in hotel rooms. We started asking the question, "what products can we replace in your business out of the linen from those beds in your hotel rooms?" We developed a co-branded range of room amenities, so laundry bags, newspaper bags, shoe bags, robes, eye masks and sleepwear items. We tried to do that at scale and had products across the United Kingdom in 10,000 Marriott rooms and 5,000 Radisson rooms.

Andy Marks, Glenn Albrecht and Kate Hurst at Purpose Conference.

We successfully raised investment, and I did that for about six years. I was very fortunate I had a background in service orientated businesses and then manufacturing. I felt that was great for me, I loved working with discarded end-of-life linen. However, my other half is Australian, and we always had it in our minds (especially when we had kids) to bring them over to Australia to be closer to her family. In 2014, when I came here, I thought about what I was going to do. I didn’t know Australia or people here other than my in-laws, and my career path isn't a linear one. It's not like I thought about replicating that circular economy development idea here, I just felt like I wasn’t ready to do that again, and I had moved on from that communications/marketing content world as well. I set out thinking I need to be positive, open, and connecting with people who are values aligned, passionate and want to create change. It's led me into interesting things.

I'm completely independent, that has its positives and challenges as everything does, but my model very broadly is to work with bottom-up grassroots disruptors who are often very fast moving while also looking at how more top-down systemic change can be created in large, complex, often slow-moving organisations.

That's why my relationship with New South Wales Government has developed over the last six years or so. Working at those two levels, as somebody who's interested in thinking about how to help drive change in the world, it's a great vantage point.

You have created and implemented an Effective Visionary Leadership approach to support organisations and leaders. Can you tell us a bit more about this?

Just to quickly recap, we (you and I Tom) had this great connection point and discovered we have both been in the circular economy development area for a while. Also, we were both quite ahead of the curve in this space and trying new things. With my Effective Visionary Leadership approach, I do have processes which are constantly being evolved and developed through the experiences I have. I'm very interested in leadership and how it works, but also in how leadership isn't always top down. It may help empower people in the middle and at all levels of an organisation to own things, take risks and be part of driving change through creating thought leadership and influencing stakeholders. But, when I was thinking about what I should tell you about my Effective Visionary Leadership approach, I also reflected on how I am at an interesting point of consideration and reflection for everything I do. This is ongoing, but periodically spikes when I’m asking myself where I should apply myself, looking at the people and taking stock of what I'm learning, because I'm so fortunate to have the flexibility I have. It's great and good for the people I work with that I can be incredibly flexible; I'm not bound to any organisation. But also, it means being in so many different environments where I am learning and experiencing a wide range of things. Being at the Purpose Conference with you having this incredible input of so many interesting and amazing people. I'm in a period of deep investigation, exploration, and reflection. I've also recently been away; I was very fortunate to get a pass for travelling to places including India with my son. I've also been reflecting on my time with environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht (I was moderating a panel with him at Purpose Conference).

If you're in any impact or purpose-driven spaces, there is this great conflict of I know what's important and know what I need to achieve, but am I truly doing enough? Are we going far enough?

A lot of the time I tend to think it's not enough. Therefore, how do you then marry the needs of a business alongside profit, planet, and people to make sure the pace of change is at the levels it needs to be. I was taking stock of some brilliant businesses I saw at Purpose [Conference] and how they are trying to change markets. There's a piece of thinking I'm evolving, and I want to share with you. I'm now asking where is the mainstream movement on change? It's very difficult if you think about an adoption model where you've got innovators and early adopters at the lower bit of the adoption curve, then the early majority and the late majority. That's where the action is right now and where change needs to happen to shift things. I'm thinking about the fact that if that’s where the change needs to happen at speed, we're already in a great disruption.

HATCH: Taronga Accelerator Program Showcase 2023.

Andy hosting the panel discussion ‘Making the Symbiocene a Reality’ at Purpose Conference.

The great disruption isn't about companies such as Uber or AirBnB, it's about climate and biodiversity. It's started, it's deep, the impact is devastating.

I'm thinking if we're in this great disruption then where is our great transformation? The great transformation is what we need to respond to the great disruption. What does ‘be in a great transformation’ mean? I'm seeing early evidence of it in some of the organisations I've met through working on the HATCH Taronga Accelerator, at Purpose Conference and so on. It's amazing to work with people doing brilliant things, and they're all obviously thinking about how to scale. How do they reach a critical mass to make their business sustainable and having the impact that's greatly needed? At Purpose [Conference], I was speaking to the founder of MCI Carbon Sophie Hamblin Wang who's developed this incredible range of technologies to try and shift the building industry and embed carbon in building materials. I also spoke with ReGen Ventures, a VC looking at how their investments must be regenerative. They are thinking very carefully about having no negative impacts. How is this movement accelerated and what’s my role in that? We know that if the mainstream isn’t part of this, then we're not going to get to where we need to get too quick enough. This is the decade where transformation needs to happen.

Looping back, what's my Effective Visionary Leadership approach? I suppose what I'm always thinking about is how do you drive the pace of change and help give people confidence that as leaders they're here to take risks and try things.

Once you start to think about a certain thing, you see all these other things reinforce it. I was listening to Bank Australia's AGM yesterday. I'm a Bank Australia customer, and their outgoing Chair said, “to finance change, you must change finance.” That's so true, but where's that at? Financing change, what does that mean? In the world I know you’re so passionate about (Tom) and the work that you do, finance is such an incredibly important part of meeting the needs of the entrepreneurs, start-ups and businesses who are more established. They need to try to shift and change their business models. The expectations of returns for those businesses are still largely the same, and impact investing is taking a different lens to that. That's a little bit of a download to you, it's almost like I'm using this interview as a bit of a cathartic process, where I'm lying on the couch with somebody giving me feedback! Glenn Albrecht, the environmental philosopher, created the concept of the Symbiocene. This is the period after the Anthropocene, the current destructive epoch we find ourselves in now. So I'm thinking about what levers will accelerate change? How do you embolden leaders and their organisations to take some risks, but ones that are thought through in a way that validates decision-making processes?

Belinda Morrissey, Tom Allen and Andy Marks at Purpose Conference.

How can we take this sustainability movement mainstream and make people understand its urgency, so they act now even when they aren’t currently at risk?

It's great to hear you ask this, and I agree it's all about what can we all do whether that's through our work, everyday lives, or our power as a consumer to try and help propel things faster. One little thing I picked up again from Bank Australia is that somebody asked at one of their talks, “what can I do?” The speaker responded, "ask your bank, what are they doing?" This was in terms of nature and biodiversity; what are they doing to increase biodiversity and reduce habitat loss? With something like this you think, “of course, you could just do that." We are empowered to ask and have conversations with other people to say, even though I'm with this bank, do I know what my bank does?

We’re more empowered than we realise, and people change things, people start movements.

The problem in part is we're trying to deal with a lot to get cut through, and people are so addicted to devices, screen time and so on. But human contact (as we experienced at the Purpose Conference) is where things change, magic conversations happen and you realise, "it’s not just me thinking like this.” You’re not the only one feeling this way, that realisation is energising.

Discussions about change can be quite abstract, we talk about it through targets and numbers. These are important to measure the movement and indicate progress. But we might also benefit from asking what future do we want to create?

Another thing from Purpose Conference was one of the speakers (an adaptation specialist) said we need to reframe what adaptation means.

Adaptation needs to be synonymous with abundance.

We can create the future that we want, and while we're trying to mitigate climate and deal with adaptation, there are still things we can try and protect. We can try and re-establish our links with nature, have nature positive strategies and actions in our lives and work. That's why I'm so interested in the work of Glenn Albrecht. The Symbiocene sets out a period in the future, and he believes there's a lot of work to be done. It will involve full employment and we need to be incredibly creative. It isn't about less in the Symbiocene, I'm inspired by that.

Where have you seen small and large organisations fall short delivering climate change sustainability outcomes?

It's not a name and shame exercise, so I'll refrain (even though it's tempting)! There's a risk and trap people fall into, and that is with box ticking. We've got sustainability plans and ESG strategies which are brought in as business as usual processes. In principle this sounds good, but they become very diluted and part of a very low subset of bigger targets. We need to have growth across the business in these ways, I get that. But how do these things become front and centre to shaping the type of growth, activities, and engagement you have with your employees and customers? What's probably harder (and what gets harder for larger organisations) is what you might call retrofitting things. There's a real risk in what they are doing, through using the United Nations SDGs or terms like sustainability, of becoming watered down. What's also happening which I picked up on is that because these things are now becoming passed down, they're not as high as agenda items at board level. But, if we did all the things we know we needed to do, if we said ‘let's do them now’, we would have a great chance of stabilising global heating, minimising species loss, and so on.

The *Sleeping Bags* launch - bags from bed linen at London’s *Zetter Hotel*

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive social change?

I'm a great believer in the power of stories as evidenced through the people at Purpose [Conference], but also how we share our stories, the stories we tell and the environment which facilitates the experiences we have together.

I was recently at the Ocean Impact PitchFest, and I heard about a lot of great things happening in that space. It still feels like it's emerging in terms of it's not at the same level as climate related investments and start-ups. They said global investment needs to be around the $165-$175 billion level per annum. Currently, it’s under $10 billion, which was a bit of a bit of a shame to see. I also mentioned a couple of other people who were at Purpose [Conference], and I know more widely. Heaps Normal the beer brand are doing some interesting work. This is not just in how they think socially and environmentally about their footprint and the impact they have, but also as it’s a product trying to change societal norm in terms of alcohol consumption and the negative impacts that has. There's no doubt a lot of great things are happening; I’ve seen this through being a part of the HATCH Taronga Accelerator program and seeing the people involved. Xylo Systems are fantastic and going places in terms of how they're trying to standardise reporting on -positive biodiversity projects.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

As far as what I read and listen to, I often need to have something different to my work to take my mind somewhere else, refresh my thinking and challenge me in different ways. I love reading fiction, but I don't tend to read a lot because I usually read things about the world we live in through different lenses. I'll be honest with you, I feel like I’m having a one-on-one conversation with you now, and it just happens that other people are listening which is lovely! I'm reading a book called Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav, and this book I first read around 30 years ago. It was given to me by a dear friend, who wrote an inscription, and I shared that inscription with her again. She lives in New York, and I said, “Ruthie, this book is still giving.” If anybody is wondering what this book is about, it contains a forward by Oprah Winfrey saying it changed her life. She said it's changed everything she does, and it has inspired her to set up her own production company, cable channel and to bring issues such as spirituality and personal development into her programs which she thought would never be possible. He has been a guest on Oprah’s show 20-25 times now. So I'm reading that again now. I would also just reinforce the benefits of putting fuel in your tank mentally and energetically. Meeting people and going out to events and conferences to make those connections, they are things which do so much for you.