In this episode of Sustainable Intelligence, we’ve got Josh Green, Novata’s COO and Co-Founder joining us. He shares why considering ESG factors is no longer a “nice to have” but a business imperative driven by regulatory, investor, and consumer pressures. He explores how businesses can navigate political and regulatory crosswinds by embedding sustainability into their core strategies and leveraging technology to streamline compliance and drive meaningful change. Josh introduces the concept of “of course, sustainability” as a pragmatic approach to long-term resilience and success.
About Sustainable Intelligence
Novata’s Sustainable Intelligence podcast brings honest, forward-thinking conversations about sustainability in the private markets. From carbon accounting to turning data into impact, each episode explores how investors and business leaders are tackling real challenges, meeting rising regulations, and building long-term value. Join us for expert insights, practical strategies, and authentic dialogue that empower action and progress in the evolving sustainability landscape. Listen to more episodes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Conversation with Josh Green (Transcript)
Ella Williamson: Welcome to Sustainable Intelligence, where we discuss all things ESG and sustainability for the private markets, brought to you by Novata. I’m Ella Williamson, and I’m thrilled to be your host. Joining us today is Josh Green, COO and Co-founder of Novata. Josh previously co-founded Panjiva, a supply chain data startup that became an Inc 500 company before being acquired by S&P Global, where he later led in their Market Intelligence division.
Josh is based in New York and brings incredible insights on innovation and leadership. I’m really excited to jump into today’s topic, chasing clarity in the ESG storm. Josh, what do you consider to be the biggest misconception businesses have about ESG and sustainability? And how can they reframe their thinking?
Josh Green: Ella, thanks so much for having me today. It’s a delight to be here. And I think there is a real misconception about ESG that exists today and it’s that ESG is a nice to have. But in fact, as most professionals who are in the space know, ESG is a business imperative and I’ll give you a couple of examples. In the short term, just about every company is facing some sort of sustainability-related pressure from a stakeholder, such as an investor who’s saying, “tell me what you’re doing on sustainability” or a customer who’s saying, “tell me what you’re doing on sustainability” or increasingly, regulatory bodies that are asking for reporting on sustainability performance.
Just about every business, every investor is facing some sort of pressure along these lines, which means that even if they’re not interested in doing good, changing the world, there is a business imperative that makes sustainability a must have, not a nice to have. Over the long term, it’s fundamentally about ensuring that your business, your investment fund is set up for success. There is lots of change in the world in terms of consumer preferences, consumer buying behavior, supply chain changes, and sustainability is wrapped up in a lot of these changes. And if you want to be confident as a business leader, that you’ve got a stable source of supply, you’ve got a stable source of demand in the years ahead, having a sustainability lens to building your business is a must have not a nice to have.
Ella: Thanks, Josh. And I like the way that you talked about it being an imperative and it’s down to the business to identify where those pressures are coming from across both the short term and the long term. Now, if we build on this slightly, how do you see sustainability being influenced by both political forces, and also the shifting ESG landscape in terms of regulation?
Josh: So the political winds are blowing when it comes to sustainability and ESG. ESG became an acronym that was under attack from some folks in the political sphere. Certainly, we’re seeing in the United States at the federal level, a shift to the right with the most recent elections, and yet, we’ve got regulations that are on the books in Europe, in different states in the United States that are really increasing the requirements for businesses to behave in sustainable ways. And those are crosswinds, right? And it’s like we’re all flying in a plane that’s being buffeted by winds blowing in totally different directions. And I will tell you that I saw this once before at my last company, Panjiva, where supply chain regulations were all over the place. And you saw significant differences in different geographies and managing that complexity became one of the core challenges for supply chain professionals. I think the same is true today for sustainability pros that having one jurisdiction tell you, you have to do something and another jurisdiction tell you that you can’t do something puts sustainability pros in a really hard spot.
And the question is how do you deal with it? What I think is going to be fundamentally different for the next era of sustainability is it’s not going to be something that people are doing because it’s a buzzword or because they think they’re going to get bonus points because they’re talking about doing sustainability. Businesses are going to be tackling sustainability because it’s core to their strategy. And I think this is the secret to navigating political cross currents. If you’re grounding what you’re doing when it comes to sustainability in your business strategy, you’re able to articulate why you’re focused on reducing carbon emissions because you’re trying to reduce the costs associated with your production processes. If you’re able to articulate why you’re building out a diverse management team to ensure that you are making the best possible decisions as a management team. To the extent that you can articulate the why, and that why is grounded in business strategy, you have nothing to fear from the political cross currents, but if you’re just doing this because you think it’s a buzzword that you should latch onto, I think that ends the way it typically ends, which is not well.
Ella: Absolutely. And I think that’s such an important point you made about becoming really literate with what your business means by its ESG initiatives and really embedding that in all you do. So with all this uncertainty that you’ve been talking about, the crosswinds, whether we are riding that wave together, how can companies balance the immediate pressures of regulatory compliance with the long-term vision of creating meaningful impact for both the business and its consumers? Are these goals ever at odds?
Josh: I do think they can certainly feel at odds. And this shows up when people are first tackling regulatory requirements that can feel daunting, can feel overwhelming, takes up a lot of time, a lot of energy. And, I think you hear from people, gosh, if I didn’t have to do all this, I could do things that really move the needle in terms of transforming our business and making it more sustainable, making it more resilient. And so in that sense, it can certainly feel like these things are at odds, or at least that there’s a tension between doing what you have to do and doing what you want to do for the sake of the business over the long term.
But what I would say is that as there’s more and more sustainability regulation on the books, I think what we’re finding and what we’re hearing from our customers is that the act of complying with the regulations that are out there helps the organization build some muscles. It builds muscles around key activities like data collection and reporting. And ultimately, results in the accumulation of, for instance, a data asset, right? So you’re building muscles, you’re building a data asset, and that puts you in a better position, number one, to deal with other regulations as they may pop up, satisfy other stakeholders who may be putting pressure on you, but also, these muscles do help with making the substantive impact that you want to have on the business in terms of putting yourself in a position where your organization actually has visibility into how it’s doing on the different dimensions of sustainability and, the adage that we often return to of “what gets measured gets managed.” Regulation is a driver for this and is enabling organizations to shine a spotlight on how the organization is doing and putting organizations in a position of having measured these things, which typically leads them to then manage these things.
So it can feel like these things are intentional in the short term. I actually think in the long term, regulation is, we’re going to look back on this kind of regulatory phase as being helpful in driving some convergence in terms of how people track this data and in terms of helping organizations build capacity for tracking this data and driving change.
Ella: The way you talked about it as building a muscle, it really highlights how this is not something that’s going to be solved in the short term, but takes years to actually perfect and get right, and actually doing those pilots of collections before you have to comply with those regulations is going to be really key.
Now, we know that in order to comply with these regulations, that technology is really helping companies comply. Where do you think the technology space when it comes to ESG is going within the next two to five years?
Josh: No question, technology is, going to be at the heart of the story because the pressures that companies are facing are growing and the sustainability pressures that need to be tackled typically by a sustainability team, first and foremost, but ultimately by the organization as a whole, those pressures are growing and teams aren’t growing as quickly as the pressures are growing.
So how do you bridge the gap that exists between the demand and supply? It’s technology. And technology will do what it always has done, which is enable people to accomplish more and to accomplish more faster. And that’s going to be really important because, as we just discussed, you look at most businesses, what they really want to do is make sure that they’re successful over the long term and focus their sustainability energy on that.
They don’t really want to be putting lots of time and energy into regulatory compliance. So to the extent that technology can and it will shrink the complexity, the cost of tackling sustainability requirements, I think that frees organizations up to focus on what they really want to be focused on. So, you know, how are we going to see technology help? I think, technology and workflow software that has transformed so many different types of processes, it’s going to do the same in sustainability. And I think there are several key steps that organizations have to go through where technology can help.
So keeping tabs on regulatory changes. We talked about how it’s a dynamic regulatory environment. It’s going to continue to be, there are going to continue to be changes. If I had to guess, I think at the federal level of the United States, we’re going to keep going right over the next few years, and that’s actually going to lead the states to go even further to the left. How do you keep track of all this and what it means for your business? Technology can help. Mapping data, the number of requests that we hear businesses are fielding when it comes to sustainability, the number of requests that investors are fielding to describe what they’re doing just keeps growing, growing and growing and growing.
And so there’s a task of then taking those requests and understanding what data you already have and mapping that data to those requests. And then managing the process of filling in the blanks. These are all areas where technology can help. And then ultimately as well, driving towards action to the extent you’ve identified areas where you want to make change, where you want to improve, technology can help you drive progress and track that progress.
So, you know, those are a few of the areas where I think technology can help. And we haven’t even used the acronym of the day, which is AI, right? So AI, the way I think about this is it’s gonna speed up all of this. Traditionally, SaaS solutions would come to the rescue and say, we’re gonna help you make these processes more streamlined. AI is going to do that; it’s going to be even faster, it’s gonna be even more efficient with these new tools that are coming online now, which is fantastic news because it does mean that what we’ll be able to do is shrink the time and cost associated with the must do’s so that organizations can focus on making the changes they want to make to sustain themselves over the long term.
So one other point that I’d make is I do think with the application of technology generally and AI specifically to sustainability challenges. I do think we are seeing the emergence of a new class of data, sustainability data, which looks different than other types of data that businesses have worked with in the past. Financial data, customer data, operational data, if you dig into each of those data sets, you see that they have unique characteristics that have implications for how organizations manage that data. Sustainability data is a unique data set. And I think It’s unique in a number of respects, but the one that I think keeps showing up for us as we talk to our customers and build out our technology is how collaborative sustainability data is inherently.
It’s data that is flowing across organizational boundaries, and that unique aspect of sustainability data means that the tools and the homes that are going to be built for sustainability data have to look a bit different than the homes that have been built for other types of data in the past.
So, of course, this is a challenge that we’re laser-focused on at Novata, but it’s going to be really interesting to see how it unfolds in the years ahead. And I think we saw how customer data found its dream home in CRM systems. I think our hope for the future is that Novata and platforms like ours will build the dream home for sustainability data in the years ahead.
Ella: That’s an awesome analogy. Let’s hope we find that dream home soon.
So, you’ve talked about the importance of collecting this data starting soon, whether it’s based on requests from stakeholders or whether it’s from regulatory demands. However, still, a lot of the time, many companies see sustainability initiatives as a luxury rather than them being essential.
And with so many ESG metrics and benchmarks swirling out there in the ecosystem, how can businesses really prioritize what matters most when they’re setting their strategies?
Josh: It’s really about getting back to basics. And ensuring if you’re in a sustainability function, that you’re not working in a silo. At a time where you’ve got political crosswinds blowing with respect to sustainability, having your sustainability activities grounded and aligned with the company’s strategy, it’s crucial. How do you do that? You do it by listening, by connecting with folks in other parts of the organization, understanding what they’re trying to accomplish, and then identifying the overlap between what they’re trying to accomplish and what you can do from the sustainability side of things. And, that sounds easy. Harder, of course, in practice, but doable and I would argue absolutely crucial at this moment in time where the winds of change are blowing. It’s crucial to make sure that the work that you’re doing is fully aligned with the company’s strategy.
Ella: Thank you for that insight, Josh. Listening is always key when it comes to being able to embed sustainability into every part of your organization, whether you’re leading it yourself or whether you’re another stakeholder as part of that journey. Now, if we look beyond the ESG numbers and the ESG reports, and based on your experience as an ESG leader, what does true ESG leadership look like and how can other leaders in your position inspire their teams to embrace a sustainability-first mindset?
Josh: I actually don’t think that sustainability first is the right mantra because I think you’re setting yourself up for pushback. Businesses have lots of priorities, but sustainability, resilience, being around for the long term is without question one of the key things that a business needs to solve for.
And so, I wouldn’t badger people into saying it’s got to be sustainability first. What I’d say is, “of course, sustainability.” When you’re making a decision about which suppliers you’re gonna work with, when you’re making a decision about how you go to market with a new product. Of course I want to think about whether the approach that you’re taking is sustainable over the long term, whether you’re going after customers with a real understanding of how customer preferences are shifting, whether you’re building a supply chain that’s resilient to the kind of shocks that we see. Whether it’s physical, risk associated with extreme weather or transition risk because you start seeing carbon taxes popping up. You want to make sure that you’re set up for success over the long term. So I prefer more of the, “of course, sustainability” mantra as opposed to “sustainability first” as a way of operating. But regardless, I do think, one way of perhaps de-politicizing this or maybe reducing the temperature a bit around some of these conversations that can get heated is by thinking about this as having a long term lens to decision making. So I would say, “of course, sustainability,” not “sustainability first.”
Ella: I think we’re all going to be going away with everything we do going forward, saying, of course, sustainability. So thank you for that mantra, Josh. And that is a great note to end on. Thank you for all your insights today. It’s been fantastic talking to you as always. Until next time, let’s keep building sustainable intelligence together. Find out more at novata.com.
