ESG Next: An Interview With IBM’s Justina Nixon-Saintil

By Greg Behrman
Feb 16, 2023 10:30 AM ET
headhost with Nation Swell logo and "ESG NEXT"
Image courtesy of Nation Swell

Originally published on Nation Swell

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Justina Nixon-Saintil, Vice President and Chief Impact Officer at IBM, about why passion and partnership are paramount to an ESG leader’s success, why engineering and corporate social responsibility work go hand-in-hand, and why the future of ESG might just be its “S.”

Behrman, NationSwell: Can you tell us about some initiatives at IBM that are exemplars of your approach?

Nixon-Saintil, IBM: When I started at IBM, there was so much goodness across the company. There were so many things we were doing in the environmental space, in the social space, in the governance space, but at the time, there wasn’t a comprehensive way of communicating this work and making sure that we brought even more awareness to it.

In 2022, we launched our ESG strategy, a framework called IBM Impact. And that was a new initiative for us as a business. I’ve been really proud of this because when you just talk — whether it’s external to investors, internal to your team or to clients — it’s really easy to talk about our framework, our ten commitments that are exemplars that we are going to continue to demonstrate progress against, and it really leads to further conversations, because it’s so much easier to understand how it all fits together.

Read the full interview here.