Nike’s Noel Kinder Knows What Drives Sustainable Change

My search for community and my commitment to impact led me to UCLA Anderson.

Veronica Seng (’25)

Throughout my career, I’ve developed a passion for service and impact in various leadership positions and initiatives I’ve championed. I started in marketing and eventually applied my skill set in the nonprofit and public sectors, where I worked in affordable housing development. Most recently, I served as co-chair of the Livability and Sustainability Committee on the Echo Park Neighborhood Council. What I sought at Anderson was a path that would incorporate that passion and idealism in a corporate role — one in which I could make real and lasting positive impact at scale.

What I found was an entire student experience engineered to create transformative leaders, students who would drive change in business throughout their careers. I gained the most insight and guidance through my conversations with engaged alumni, amazing guest speakers and the meaningful programming organized by our student-led professional clubs.

At an Anderson orientation session in my first term, I was lucky enough to hear Devon Dickau (’15), the diversity, equity and inclusion offerings leader at consulting and advisory services giant Deloitte, speak about his career journey and experience at Anderson. What he shared that day echoed my own passion for social impact. He was able to carve out a career path for himself at Deloitte that afforded him opportunities to scale his impact to a far greater extent than he’d imagined while he was a student at Anderson.

There, right before my eyes, was the validation I needed that I was on the right path, and I knew I had come to the right place.

Almost immediately, I joined Anderson’s award-winning Net Impact chapter, our professional club for impact- and sustainability-focused careers. Net Impact’s vision across its national chapters is to inspire and equip emerging leaders to build a more just and sustainable world. One of the ways Net Impact, in partnership with Anderson’s Center for Impact, aims to inspire students is through its High Impact Tea speaker series, which brings true change-makers to campus to share their wisdom with the community.

Net Impact and the Center for Impact recently invited Noel Kinder, Nike’s former chief sustainability officer, to speak on campus for the first time. Kinder joined Nike in 1999, at a time when the company didn’t count “sustainability” among its top priorities. He worked in operations for more than 10 years, steadily accumulating the experience, credibility and relationships necessary later to be effective in the CSO role. He cultivated relationships and built the trust that would earn his initiatives support within the company, and people said yes to his projects. Nike’s biggest carbon footprint is in materials, so Kinder concentrated his efforts in leading his teams to drive innovation in that space.

Nkemdilim Chukwuma (’24) preceded Seng as president of UCLA Anderson’s Net Impact chapter

In 2020, during Kinder’s tenure as CSO, Nike declared 29 corporate targets to guide its purpose-driven efforts through 2025: among them, responsible sourcing and protecting the planet. The company’s FY2023 impact report shows a 70% absolute reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in its owned or operated facilities through 100% renewable electricity and fleet electrification.

What impressed me about Kinder was not only the impact he was driving at Nike, but more so how he got there in the first place. He didn’t start off in the corporate sphere. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in Honduras and worked in nonprofits before joining Nike, and reminded MBA students in the audience who aspire to be leaders in sustainability that lasting change sometimes takes time, and we don’t make that kind of progress alone. A “facilitative” and collaborative approach is the most effective — especially when trying to strike a balance among different stakeholders with competing priorities.

What resonated with me most about his talk was the pragmatic approach he took to driving impact. He shared three lessons he learned along his “meandering” career:

1. “There are some things you cannot control.” While in the Peace Corps, he built much-needed water infrastructure in communities — only for it to be completely wiped out by a hurricane. “Sometimes it sucks, sometimes you learn from it. And sometimes it’s both.”
2. “Patience is critical.” Driving lasting change takes time.
3. “It’s really hard to drive change if you don’t understand how change happens.” You can work within the system. Blending idealism with pragmatism is necessary to drive change from within.

Reflecting on the many roles he’s assumed over his career, Kinder said, “I was more effective because of the road I had taken, with all the twists and turns.”

After the panel, I approached him for some career advice. He gave me the reassurance that I would need to leverage all of my experiences and forge meaningful relationships with not just senior leaders and stakeholders, but with my future teams in order to drive meaningful change.

Because you’ve heard it before: You can’t be a leader if no one wants to follow you. That’s a simple truth.

That’s why, as incoming president of Net Impact at Anderson, I’m adopting collaboration as the word of the year. Along with club leaders across the school, I think it matters that students from all functions and industries join our conversations about driving positive societal impact. Taking Noel Kinder’s advice on leading with a facilitative and collaborative approach, I’m committed to breaking out of our silos. With executive vice president Daniel Rodriguez (’25), who brings a finance background to Net Impact, I would like to equip fellow MBAs with the knowledge that Net Impact has relevance to every student. It’s through Net Impact that I’m broadening my understanding of current ESG trends and challenges to implementing sustainability initiatives. I hope to deliver even more valuable learning and networking opportunities for all Anderson students, so they feel equipped to become purpose-oriented leaders in any sector they go into.

Veronica Seng (’25) is incoming president of UCLA Anderson’s award-winning Net Impact chapter and co-president of the Alliance for Latinx Management at Anderson. In 2024, she will be interning as an MBA summer associate at Deloitte Consulting.