“We want everybody in the company to really be looking at their jobs through this lens of social and environmental sustainability.”
Several years ago, a high school student in southern Dallas shadowed Charlene Lake for the day at AT&T. At the end of the experience, the young woman spoke about her career ambitions to be a teacher. “When I brought up college, she had a surprised look on her face,” says Lake. “It took me a while to figure out what was going on and finally she said, ‘I didn’t realize I had to go to college to do that.’”
Nobody had ever told this ambitious young high school student that she had to get a college degree—and possibly even two degrees—to pursue the career of her dreams. The first person to talk to her about going to college was the corporate executive she had been shadowing for the day at AT&T.
“It was a stark reminder of how much we can assume in these jobs about the gap between what we know and what certain populations of the country know,” says Lake, who is now AT&T’s chief sustainability officer and senior vice-president of corporate responsibility.
A former journalist who grew up in rural America, Lake has long appreciated the power of communication and connectivity. And of course it makes sense that “bridging the digital divide” would be the number one priority for the sustainability chief of AT&T.
A close second, she says, is how the company can use its technology and data to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and make the network more resilient.
A Culture of Sustainability
“Both are obviously tied directly to the core of our business,” says Lake. Moreover, she adds, achieving those goals “is really part of all employees’ jobs at this company.”
An employee, for example, came up with the idea of creating a helmet with 5G technology to help deaf and hard of hearing football players at Gallaudet University communicate better during games. “It came from somebody who was thinking about our 5G technology and thinking about how we can demonstrate more impact with that technology.”
“That’s the kind of culture that we’re trying to create,” says Lake. “We want everybody in the company to really be looking at their jobs through this lens of social and environmental sustainability.”
For more on what she has done to help achieve that, and how she’s leading the push for sustainability in both the digital and physical domain, click on the interview above.
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