Carol Cone:
I'm Carol Cone, and welcome to Purpose 360, the podcast that unlocks the power of purpose to ignite business and social impact. Often on Purpose 360, we invite guests to talk about their CSR strategies and programs, corporate social responsibility. Well, today we're going to turn that acronym on its head, CR&S, and that stands for climate, resiliency, and sustainability. Joining me is Alastair MacGregor, Senior Vice President of Property and Buildings for WSP USA. WSP USA is a subsidiary of WSP Global, one of the world's leading engineering and professional services firms with nearly 150,000 active projects around the globe.
WSP thrives on solving sustainability problems for business, public sector, and not-for-profit clients. They approach them with a view of what is created today must perform in a world that's going to be very different in 10 years, 20 years, 30, 40 years and more.
You may have heard of some of their projects. The Salesforce Tower, One World Trade Center, the Moynihan Train Hall in New York City. It's gorgeous, I've been through it. It's really supportive of the traveler. They also have philosophy called Future Ready, and Aly's going to talk about that, but he's also going to talk about the book that he helped to write for WSP that just came out earlier this year called Future Ready, so join me for this discussion of CR&S. So welcome to the show, Aly.
Aly MacGregor:
Thanks, Carol, and just as you just said, so it's Aly unless I'm in trouble, so hopefully I'm Aly for the rest of the conversation.
Carol Cone:
Yeah, you'll be fine. This is going to be a great conversation. We always like to start by asking you about your background and your journey to WSP.
Aly MacGregor:
Oh, great, so thanks. I am based in Southern California, but as you can tell from my accent, I am not from Southern California, so-
Carol Cone:
Not at all.
Aly MacGregor:
... and I took a slightly unusual route to WSP. It started back in Scotland where I'm from. I worked in software development. I worked for a soccer agent who would argue he was a Scottish Jerry McGuire. I worked in Finance, but then I quickly realized that my passion was for delivering high-performance solutions to complex problems. In essence, I realized that I just had to embrace the fact that I was an engineer. My Mom would look back now and say, "We could have told you that when you were five," but that took me a little bit longer to kind of get there.
I came over to the U.S. in '04 and I've had the fortune of being involved in some fantastic projects, working with some amazing designers over the years that have allowed me to push the boundaries and create some real-world firsts. I even created an iPhone accessory that was featured on The Today Show, so I've done some unusual things that just demonstrate I'm not your traditional engineer and it's all about challenging the complex problems and coming up with things differently.
I joined WSP just over a year ago, and I joined because I realized that to make a dent on some of the toughest and most complex problems that we're seeing in the world today, I need to be a part of a team that brought together the technical expertise and the innovative thinking to those problems.
Carol Cone:
I just want to talk a little bit more about who WSP is because if you're not looking for your services or you're involved in big engineering projects, you don't know them, but the company's extraordinary. You are literally building the future in more than 500 cities, and so can you just explain a little bit more about the range of your services?
Aly MacGregor:
Yeah, so at WSP, we are driven by that technical expertise as you're talking about, Carol. We will have urban designers and planners, we'll have civil engineers, transportation engineers. In the build environment where I focus, we have structural, civil, mechanical, electrical, sustainability experts. We have acousticians.
I see it more as being a chef or being solid in the kitchen. We have the most fantastic set of ingredients in our kitchen, but we're not a Michelin five-star chef. It's less about us as it is about the solutions that we create.
Carol Cone:
I love that at your core, part of your ethos is that it's not just building a building or a bridge or renovating a train hall or something because you look at the climate impacts from every single area, the human impacts, the societal impacts. So I want to go back to some of the basics because our listeners may not understand this. You hear the term "built environment" a lot. Can you explain that in a fairly simple way what a built environment is?
Aly MacGregor:
It's the communities we live in. What I mean by that, in many cases, the parts that are most important and most impactful in our communities are not the buildings, it's the spaces between them.
Carol Cone:
Hmm. Okay. All right, and so also I'd love to know, what is a smart building?
Aly MacGregor:
A smart building is one where all of the digital technologies within that building are connected and are theoretically made available to optimize its performance and its engagement with its people. I personally believe that what my teams and what I charge them to do is that it's less about a smart building. It's more about creating a connected building that can be driven and empower smart people. It's less about the basically building going off and doing its own thing. It's more about, how do people engage with it? How do people pull information from it and become a data source? It's more collaborative.
Carol Cone:
Absolutely, so WSP has won a lot of awards, and now many of our clients, they chase the awards. They proudly put them in their lobbies at HQ, but you're different because these awards, and they're quite different, so congratulations. You just won Fortune Change the World Award, and that was only given to 59 companies. You're ranked as number 37. That's extraordinary.
Then, you also won, and I love this one, Fast Company is one of the brands that matter, and so usually it's like a sneaker or food or something like that, but no, it was WSP. That was a great one, and then Time Magazine as one of The World's Best Companies, and Corporate Knights in Canada because you are a Canadian headquartered in Quebec company, but you are massively global. Can you talk a little bit about the purpose of WSP that is fueling these impressive accolades, but really the way you do business?
Aly MacGregor:
Thanks. Carol. I mean, you're right, some of those awards, we're humbled to be part of those lists, but I think what's happening in many of these things is we're getting past the smoke and mirrors and you actually look. They're becoming more informed. What does it mean? I think people are realizing that a brand like WSP, who is touching the build environment in my case and all the transport and infrastructure around the world, has significant impact. Therefore, we have that responsibility to really lead in the space.
To your point on what is our purpose, well, it's been commented and talked about in multiple different ways. I think this idea of being Future Ready, future-proofing our cities and communities going forward is where it comes down in a really tight way. If you step back to our let's say local beginnings about 130 years ago, it's crazy. The original firms that become WSP are getting that old all the way to where we are today as this global consulting firm. Every milestone that we've reached has enabled us to better fulfill our purpose, which you could arguably say is preparing our communities and environments for the future.
Carol Cone:
That's brilliantly stated, and climate is at the center of so much of what you do. It is not a bolt-on. It is totally lived and built, and it's really again, your lifeblood.
Aly MacGregor:
It is, and I think that's the bit that's interesting. As I said earlier, our purpose is not about becoming the biggest or having the largest global reach. That's an enabler of where we want to go. It is about our people, so our purpose is about connecting those passionate people united by that common purpose, creating the positive long-lasting impacts in our communities. We get there because it's fostering that culture of innovation, technical excellence, and candidly the respect for a different point of view that you'd inherently get from the different lenses we have in the business.
If you look at the climate, that's a great example, and the changes we're seeing in the climate, a great example of the complex challenges where we flourish. I think the first thing we can say is there is definitely a new normal, and the new normal is really built around this need to embrace uncertainty.
It means that every single one of our clients has to reevaluate whether the way they've done business or they've developed their community historically, if they continue going that route, whether it's going to cut it or whether they have to step back and think differently. What's really interesting is our structural and civil teams are working with ASCE on their Future World Vision Project, which is about creating an immersive idea in the VR and stuff around what the city of tomorrow would look like. What's wonderful in that space is it allows our teams and our clients to think about, let's just ask ourselves, "What would I be doing differently in making this decision if the world that I was in looked like this?"
Carol Cone:
That's great. I mean, what a magnet for talent. I don't want to go any farther without giving our listeners a few examples of some really exciting projects in the United States, and if you will also want to mentioned global. One that really delighted me, and this is a little, I think it was 2020, but it's the net-zero McDonald's that you built. As I was studying it and we started working with you, I was down in Disney World and I was lost. I was trying to find a hotel or whatever, and all of a sudden, there was the McDonald's, the one that you built. Can you explain what that one is? That's really interesting.
Aly MacGregor:
Yeah, so the McDonald's one is a great project, Carol, because essentially you've got a building where McDonald's challenged the design team where we were fortunate to be the engineering team on that to go back to basics and say, "If we were to really drive for a net-zero McDonald's, what could that be? What would it look like?" You end up with a building which is fully electrified, creates all of its energy on site, that is maximizing use of daylight so that we're... and is using passive ventilation approaches to make sure that the air quality is really, really strong.
It's funny that you latched onto that one because it does look visually stunning. It's a really unique building and there's a key part and a responsibility in that building to educate people. The fact that it's in Disney World means that people from all across the country, across the world have a chance of popping in there and getting a burger, but while they're there, there's things in that space that are going to educate them with the fact that the burger's being cooked on a solar-powered grill essentially. It's like they get their burger, their fries, and a side of education in sustainability and what's possible.
Carol, the bit that I find the most exciting about that is the fact that I think there's over 14,000 McDonald's across the United States, and so in terms of the projects that we work in, that's a great example of something where it can... as it scales and it gets put in other places, it's not just one big iconic project which might win a couple of awards. It's about things that become personal in people's local communities because it's far too easy to point at the big, shiny object of, "Here's the X billion dollar LEED Platinum building," because people say, "That's lovely, beautiful. I'm not going to be able to get into that tower block to see what it's like because I haven't got a security pass." They don't engage with it, so therefore, people see sustainability as exotic.
Imagine if every community across the United States had an electric hospital, if the fast food restaurants were all embracing what McDonald's was doing and they were going to see a sports team that was a LEED Platinum and doing all these things. People would realize that the new normal of driving towards decarbonization, it's not scary or far away. It's things we can do now, and that the idea of Future Ready does have a path to Future Now.
Carol Cone:
I'm glad you mentioned Future Ready because when we first met and you talked about that was a philosophy of the company and then it became a book. If you can first talk a little bit for our listeners about, what does Future Ready mean? Talk about the philosophy first and then we're going to get into the book.
Aly MacGregor:
I've grown up in a design world, in a consulting world my whole life, and it's really easy for a consultant just to do what you're asked. If a client, they've defined the scope of their ask and they come to us and they ask us. We realized that because of who we are, because of how we engage and the conversation we have around the globe with some of these really truly forward-thinking clients, that we had that responsibility to challenge. Just taking the Oliver Twist role and saying, "Thank you very much," and then moving on. We also realized that if we just asked a client cold about whether we should be designed to net zero or we should electrify their buildings, again in my space, the typical knee-jerk reaction would be something like, "Well, it's a great concept, we'd love to do it, but unfortunately we don't have the budget."
The way we kind of look at is, "Well, okay, if we wanted to challenge this idea of Future Ready, it's about recognizing that we don't necessarily have to push everything as being Future Now, as it being today and immediate on our clients, which becomes scary in that first conversation, but that we need to take them on a journey." We need to be their partner. That starts with that engagement, and then everything builds towards getting to a point where they're engaging or considering resiliency, climate, and sustainability in their strategic approaches to their business, and that we're enabling that in the build environment to help them get there.
I challenge our teams often to make sure that we position ourselves that our clients realize that, first and foremost, we're there to understand their business and to develop built environments that are in support of that business. It's about us understanding their business, not just their buildings or their built environment.
Carol Cone:
There you go. I want to now go to the book, Future Ready. It's a great book and our listeners should absolutely read it, but I want to read a couple of reviews. They're on the jacket cover. First of all, the word keeps coming up, timely, timely, timely because of the climate challenges we have. Future Ready, one of them said, "A vision for doing resiliency." I really like that one. Then, another one said, "A compelling account for an organization's journey to rethink everything and coalesce around this Future Ready philosophy to bring sustainability, resilience, and climate action to the heart of organizations."
Congratulations on the book, and let's talk a little bit about the genesis of it because you had just joined the company and a book is daunting, but what was your journey like?
Aly MacGregor:
What was interesting, Carol, is that you're right, I literally just joined WSP, and just as earlier in the conversation, WSP is this immense kind of talent pull. I was really keen to learn about all the amazing things that the teams across WSP are doing, and I was fortunate enough that there'd been a conversation starting about the idea of taking a few trainings, a book. They said, "Aly, we'd love to get you engaged and be part of this." I was like, "Use me coach, I'm fresh. Let me learn."
Now, what's interesting about why it was becoming a conversation, Carol, why I was really excited around the idea of timely is you talked about a number of stats earlier. I went onto Amazon yesterday and I searched. There's over 20,000 books on Amazon on climate. There are over a thousand on resilience, and over 10,000 on sustainability, so the topic's not new, or each of those individual topics are not new. I think if I was to put in a search that had the three together, the number just shrinks because everyone's got their swim lane of where they look. There's a lot of fantastic information. There's a lot of valid arguments, so the seriousness of the situation we're in, the importance of sustainability of climate change.
The question I kept asking myself, why weren't people getting it? You go to the various sustainability conferences and the sustainability of our experts were in violent agreement and would talk passionately about the seriousness of the situation, but it wasn't sticking in all of the client's C-suites and through their organizations. You would get a real difference between corporate commitment and what was actually happening on the ground. What we challenged ourselves was, "Well, one of the things that makes WSP or makes us unique as a partner to some of our clients is that we can help them in the strategy work, but that we can also help them implement it once the strategy's there so that the strategy isn't just going to become a really nice doorstop that sits in the office." As we stepped up in that leadership role, we said, "Let's look at this differently and let's see what the commonality," and what we found was in many ways the challenge was people were still seeing it as somebody else's problem.
Carol Cone:
Aah, okay.
Aly MacGregor:
Future Ready as a book had one goal, and that really was to capture both the strategic side and that process development strategy, but also the ways in which we'd look to operationalize them in a way that makes it personal to the readers. The way it tied back to me learning about our business is the book is full of examples of where we've done it before, the projects we've completed, how we've tackled different things. Again, go back to what I said earlier, to make sure that people realize this is not about exotic kind of technologies, it's about things we've got available turned out we can make significant impact.
Carol Cone:
You made a really important comment, you've done it also in interviews and such, make sustainability personal. Can you elaborate upon that? There's so many challenges to like, "Well, does the general population really understand what it is it today? What's the impact tomorrow?" Obviously, we've had fires and floods and earthquakes and such, but why make it personal? Why is it so important?
Aly MacGregor:
It helps people realize that it's something that it's impacting us today. It's not necessarily just about something that's hypothetical that's going to impact our children or our grandkids. If you open the book, my co-author starts the book talking about his personal experience in Hurricane Sandy.
It's something that we have to embrace today, and by making it personal, it's making it personal to the individual, to the company, to the city, and make it part of as we form all of those and developing who they want to be going forward and making sure they're future ready. Where it gets fun, Carol, is that we don't know that there's lots of variation of where that future is going to be. It's about being agile, it's about being flexible, but there are still certain strategies that we could do right now that they're going to set us up in a good way for a number of those futures.
Carol Cone:
Our listeners have to buy the book so they can find their personal connection. I love that it is not CSR, my colleagues. It is CRS, and it's climate, resiliency, and sustainability. Can you talk a little bit about, and the book's great, so thank you so much. Can you talk a little bit about resiliency? What does it look like in both for climate success, if you can have success addressing climate issues, and also for people and for your employees, your colleagues, but also your clients? What does resiliency mean? Why is it important?
Aly MacGregor:
Here's the first thing, Carol, I'll say is that while climate is one of the potential impact or the potential events, and it's the one that as people talk about resilience or resiliency, that this jumps straight to mind. It's not the only one.
In terms of what a future ready client or entity looks like that is focused on resilience, it is one that is thinking through that scenario-planning process, reacting in advance or having a plan in advance as to how they would respond if such a thing would happen. It's like a GPS in your car because in many ways the idea of getting a climate resilient solution where it doesn't matter if there's a storm or there's a flood that your facility, your business as a client entity is able to maintain its operations and keep its people safe.
Like the GPS, the easy and the obvious way from A to B is on the freeway. It's the big kind of pay a big bunch of money and get there, but in reality, there's going to be times as we get there that you have to take the detour on the surface streets to get to where you're looking. From a robustness perspective, it could also be looking into this idea of responsiveness. It could be looking at the area of how quickly it gets back up on its feet. It may be okay if the lowest floor of your building floods as long as it's not critical to operations and you can clean and get moving fast. It's about thinking a little bit differently.
Carol Cone:
What is a Future Ready mindset?
Aly MacGregor:
What is a Future Ready mindset? I think it goes back to this idea, Carol, that the future is not set. That what we've done in the past is likely not going to suffice in the world in which we are living in tomorrow, and that we have to embrace the unknown and we need to think differently in terms of how we evaluate decisions. I think we have to think through the idea that it's a Future Ready mindset, again, is one that embraces a responsibility today to set ourselves up for tomorrow and not use excuses that it's based on exotic technologies or something that we do tomorrow.
Carol Cone:
Okay, so personalize it, show the operational impacts, et cetera, make it more especially for the non-technical C-suite individuals who have to manage and project the future, but the future is not exactly-
Aly MacGregor:
Yeah-
Carol Cone:
... projectable.
Aly MacGregor:
... exactly, so if you look, so again, Future Ready mindset is embracing that it's a responsibility of that C-suite today or us as consultants to help them get there, that they have to think through those strategies going forward. We have to start thinking it through now. What's interesting, Carol, if you look in Europe right now, they've just put in the legislation that, again, going back to this idea of being more informed in the carbon, in the resiliency, in the climate space, that it's not appropriate.
It's not allowed to call yourself net zero if all you're doing is writing a big check for offsets. There's an awareness. I think that's a big change that's happened in the market recently in terms of megatrends is I would say there's a growing awareness of what it means to be carbon credible and that we're beyond the point where it's like someone can just call themselves sustainable or resilient or embracing climate. It's like, "Well, what does that mean?" It's about operationalizing the strategies.
Carol Cone:
It's interesting. I love what you said, growing awareness of being carbon credible because in the way back when, in the cause marketing world where companies would take on an issue and, for example, breast cancer, breast cancer in the beginning it was, and we worked with Avon and they had a very, very credible support of breast cancer around the globe. It became over a billion dollars in early detection and such, but then the month kept getting pinker and pinker and pinker and pinker and pinker and we call that pinkwashing. I love the fact that you're talking about carbon credible, and you're right, and Europe's leading a lot of the regulation that is now impacting the U.S. What do you think, I'm going to put you on the spot again here, what do you think of Gavin Newsom since you're in California, of the laws that he's putting onto companies? What do you think of that?
Aly MacGregor:
There's actually a very exciting change in the California building codes coming in middle of next year, which is going to challenge our people to think about embodied carbon differently. Now, that's a huge difference, Carol, because I would offer, even though we talk about buildings being 50 to a hundred-year buildings, compared to buildings in Europe that have been around for hundreds of years, that's still almost a disposable approach to built environment. If we actually look at this idea of if we've already got a building and that sort of, "Do we demo, do we start from new?", how do we make sure that for the carbon that we are already emitting or we have emitted that we're not adding it for the sake of it?
California has always been in that space of being bold in terms of how it is challenging the design and the construction market to get there. Now, the good news is their process for doing that has already to get to this point has confidently shown that the steps that they're taking are economically viable. That's important on that side. That, then, allows California to continue to lead the charge.
The other aspect as you talk about Governor Newsom is it's about the stuff that's going through the State Senate right now around reporting of carbon performance for businesses of significant size. I think what we'll find is the majority of companies that fall into that category of a billion dollars in a month are probably already doing it for other aspects. What'll happen, and I can lead to dealing a little bit more, is if they're asking for specifics of what's happening in California or it's their expectation of what they're doing corporately.
Carol Cone:
Super. Well, it's a little bit parallel to what the Business Roundtable did when they declared that companies had an obligation to serve stakeholders, not shareholders, and almost all of the companies, the 200 leading this country, said, "We're already doing it," but they codified it to try and just make a statement of those leaders to then scale to other organizations. I want to know about your specific leadership secrets. You've got all these incredible individuals you're bringing together to look at the white space, not the specific, but the magic in between the white space of all the disciplines. What are your leadership one or two, three principles for anyone who's trying to come up with innovative solutions to complex challenges?
Aly MacGregor:
I think you said earlier, it's about being that kind band leader. My role in many ways is to get people excited, to show passion, to bring passion to a conversation, which is infectious, that makes people comfortable in going outside their comfort zone.
We need to be bold. We need to think around performance. What are we trying to achieve? I see it as part of my role is as a translator. It's about that translator of and the translation between technical experts and let's say business or community experts who speak differently, at least speak in different languages. They have a common goal, but there's a translation needed to get them both on the same page, so that's a big part of what I-
Carol Cone:
Right.
Aly MacGregor:
... see my role as being.
Carol Cone:
Yeah. Yeah. Wow, so first of all, you're going to be inundated by people who want to talk with you about, "Hey, how do I do this?", so you'll have to prepare for that. I always love to give the last comment to my guest, and I know that you and I could talk a lot more about specific projects. I know a lot about your specific projects and they're very cool, but the mic is over to you, Aly, what you'd like to leave with our listeners. It's been a brilliant view into climate, resiliency, sustainability, and how to make it personal, but what are some last thoughts?
Aly MacGregor:
I guess just very, very simply I would offer to anyone that's intrigued by this is find that partner to help you. You don't have to be an expert. If you go back to, as you said, Future Ready, my view of the world, it really is the fact that we can take sustainability, resilience, climate, we can integrate that into the core vision for your company, for your city, for your community. If you do that, you can come up with fantastic solutions that allow your community to be resilient, your business to be resilient kind of moving forward. It doesn't have to be an add-on or a bolt-on. It can be a holistic solution that's a true win-win.
Carol Cone:
Super. I love your diverse background, and it seems like you've found your place now in terms of architecting a resilient, climate-focused and sustainable future. We are very, very thrilled to just have you as a human being with this dedication and vision. I'm not going to call you by your formal name because I'm not going to wag a finger. I'm going to say Aly MacGregor, this has been a brilliant conversation. Listeners, buy the book. It's a great book, Future Ready, and we look forward to more of the outcomes, projects, initiatives that you are going to lead in the Property and Buildings space for WSP, so keep up-
Aly MacGregor:
Thanks so much, Carol.
Carol Cone:
... the brilliant work. Thank you for being a guest.
Aly MacGregor:
Thanks so much.
Carol Cone:
This podcast was brought to you by some amazing people, and I'd love to thank them. Anne Hundertmark and Kristen Kenney at Carol Cone ON PURPOSE, Pete Wright and Andy Nelson, our crack production team at TruStory FM, and you, our listener. Please rate and rank us because we really want to be as high as possible as one of the top business podcasts available so that we can continue exploring together the importance and the activation of authentic purpose. Thanks so much for listening.
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