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I believe that if you have an inkling about something, you should
follow it and see where it leads you. It sounds like Kate Larsen,
originally from New Zealand, has always had an inkling of what’s
important to her, but it was finding how to bring it all together
that took her journey on a few interesting curves before she found
her place full of exciting new challenges.
How would you describe yourself? Who is Kate?
I’m someone who is passionate and who loves facing big challenges.
I like to think I am open-minded. I like to work with many
different types of people testing different ideas for how to solve
particular problems. I like to work across cultures, and try to
build understanding between the different sides; to give different
sides insights into shared motivations, even though on the surface
the two parties goals might appear different.
I also enjoy working and living from the bottom to the top.
Exploring anything from 30p bowl of noodle local Beijing
restaurants and doing factory worker interviews, to international
conferences and big issue meetings with Senior Executives. I like
learning from all parts of society.
What are you working on now?
I work for an international fashion brand. I’m their CSR
(Corporate Social Responsibility) Manager for Asia. Currently, I’m
based in Beijing, but I’m soon relocating to Hong Kong. Our
company has about 5000 people worldwide, including factory workers
(we have 4-5 of our own factories), and store staff.
My work allows me to interact with a variety of actors in the
CSR field. My role is two-fold. On the one hand, I work on
improving environmental and working conditions in factories in
Asia. But we also aim to work with our company executives in
London, and the media and NGO worlds, helping to build insights of
their impact on environmental and social conditions in Asia and
the West.
My work entails meetings with specialist consultants, NGOs in
the area of environmental management or CSR, executives in
procurement, legal, risk in, my firm and other retail firms,
factory managers and workers, audit firms, you name it. It is also
crucial that I continuously keep myself up to date through reading
and researching what solutions are being developed to solve
environmental and social problems elsewhere, so that I can figure
out what might work for us and to promote these internally and to
our suppliers.
What has been your journey to what you are doing now?
I’ve been interested in and aware of environmental protection
issues since I was young. I first joined Greenpeace at about age
eight.
At school, we were taught that service and success go hand in
hand, that it is possible to serve society and achieve personal
success. Despite this, I couldn’t really see what I could do in
service or creatively without being poor, so I went down the
normal of going to university and studying business. I got
involved in an international student organisation called AIESEC.
It was at one of their global conferences that I met people
working in CSR, and realised that it was possible to have a
corporate job where you dealt with social and environmental
issues, and still earn decent money. I was excited about it not
having to be one or the other - that I really could make a decent
living and contribute to social and environmental solutions at the
same time.
I didn’t start doing this work right after university though. I
worked for AIESEC running the China extension in China for two
years, then went to work for Yahoo! out in California for 1 ½
years on an AIESEC traineeship. I then came to London, and took
whatever professional work I could get, ending up doing more work
for a small management consultancy as they were interested in
developing their CSR work. About that time I joined the CSR-
Chicks mailing list (a Yahoo! Group for women working and
interested in CSR issues) and started reading a lot more about the
environmental and CSR work various people were doing.
The more I read, the more I became more confident that I was
starting to know something about business CSR issues. My
particular interest is in China CSR issues, which I have a passion
for as I studied Chinese and began my career working in China, and
also due to seeing dead fish floating upside down in polluted
lakes when I fest went to study in China. So, after doing a lot of
Landmark Education personal development work I started to get the
guts to proactively approach people who I it looked like were
doing something related to environmental and social work in China
and whom I wished I could work for or with, and shared with them
how excited about these issues I was and, when appropriate, how I
would really love to work with them. This was about a one year
exercise of randomly (yet consistently) contacting people, partly
to sell my firms consulting services, whilst carrying on learning
and contributing as much as I could, and learning and contributing
as much as I could where I was working. I was in an exciting firm
which was doing some cutting edge CSR work, but what was missing
for me, was working on China projects, as that was where my
passion lay.
The learning path paid off eventually, as I was hired as a
Senior Consultant in a new Social/CSR consulting team for ERM
China, a branch of the international environmental management
consultancy, into a job I found almost totally fulfilling. Last
year I moved to my current role, after seeing a job advertisement
for a CSR Manager for Asia requiring Chinese and Japanese, and
despite having been using my Chinese, being worried that I wasn’t
using and would lose my Japanese language skills.
What was the turning point?
Starting to work at ERM was a huge turning point. I could have
kept on working at the consultancy in London, but my heart was in
China. I wanted to work in Asia. I’d lived in China before and I
spoke Chinese, so I wanted to use this.
The 2 years preceding ERM felt like an on-going process of
figuring out what different firms were doing and what it was that
I was mostly interested in. I’d print long reports, read them, and
get a real sense of what the challenges in the field were, as well
as being lucky to be able to hear about CSR first-hand from
different people in the industry through the sales aspect of my
London job, and some of our consulting projects. Looking back it’s
great to have gone from knowing that there are people who are
doing this work, to reading and exploring, and then becoming one
of the people in the world doing this work.
When I was at Yahoo, I knew I wanted to do this type of work,
but I had no idea how to get into it, because I wasn’t actively
researching and reading. Once I started doing that, I tapped into
the competency that I have in CSR, which not so many other people
in the West have: being passionate about CSR issues in China. I
developed that competency, because I bothered to do the research
(reading). In this field (but probably in others as well) it’s
important to find an area where you have a competitive advantage;
something you bring to the table that others don’t have.
I’m passionate about China, I speak Chinese, and I had done my
homework. So when I joined ERM, even though I didn’t know much
about environmental impact assessments, I was able to immediately
get on with delivering project work, because I understood what the
issues were and what the big picture our clients were dealing with
was.
How are you feeling now? How do you see the future?
There’s a lot of good work that has already been done in CSR, and
my focus area of ethical sourcing, but a long way to go yet. “Made
in China” used to mean rubbish to consumers due to bad quality,
but quality management is now a normal part of every business, and
as a consumer you no longer expect something “Made in China” to
fall a part. The best computers, phones, household equipment,
clothing, are all “Made in China”. The same is slowly starting to
happen with social and environmental standards in China. Looking
after workers health, safety, wages, hours, etc, and wastewater
and energy usage is slowly starting to become as mainstream as
quality management for the better factories in China and Asia.
In the other area I work on with our London based CSR Manager,
our corporate CSR management, it’s satisfying to see that all
these things we have been pushing for (even things like having
light switches in offices so lights can be turned off, and paper
recycling) are becoming industry norm, and in many cases being
acknowledged to be generating a positive financial return for
business. We are optimistic that things will change very fast in
our firm toward organic cotton, environmental impact reduction,
sustainable design in our industry.
I’m finding my work fascinating and very challenging. There’s
so much to learn, and so many different ways to approach things.
There are also many different players involved, and I enjoy the
challenge of getting to work with various stakeholders – from
senior executives to factory workers and NGOs, to Communist party
groups.
Would you do anything differently?
I’d have studied whatever I wanted at university. I can see now
that, while I do use my business studies, it didn’t really doesn’t
matter what I studied to do this job, as a lot can be learned on
the job, and your passionate interest and ability to keep
learning, both formally and informally is what is most important
to getting and delivering on any job.
I’d pursue a Master’s degree part-time a lot earlier to enhance
my resume and improve my confidence. It would help me to have even
deeper knowledge in an area, and to develop stronger learning and
writing skills. What I sometimes feel I’m missing is evidence of
the reading that I’ve done. Post-grad qualifications allow others
to see what you know.
I’d have been very open to any internship that would have got
me into a factory, because this is hugely useful to any CSR work
looking at supply chain or environmental management of factories.
By the same token, I’d have also taken any opportunity to
volunteer with NGOs/research groups. It would have been
invaluable, because I would have learned to understand what the
various stakeholders face and how different campaigns work
I would have quit my Yahoo job a lot earlier. I was there for
18 months, and felt loyalty, because they treated me so well, and
it was an exciting place to learn and I had a great boss, but I
knew the line of work wasn’t challenging enough for me, so I would
have got some guts and moved on to the next step a lot faster.
What advice would you give to other people in similar
situations as you were in?
• Continue developing yourself on a personal level – it doesn’t
matter what you do, as long as you continuously learn how to set
goals, deal with roadblocks, whilst also enjoying the present.
Other skills that are crucial are how to work with and influence
other people (there is so much endless learning in this area), how
to achieve things when there is a lot of resistance. In this
industry you live in a dual world of both what’s possible (a
pollution free environment), and the fear that the world is coming
to an end (climate change, etc). Through the personal development
I’ve done, I’ve learned not to stress out too much about the
things I can’t immediately change, to do what I can, and make the
most of those experiences. I’ve learned to just stay committed to
what I believe is important, and continue believing that anything
is possible. You’ll meet the other people fighting for the same
dream as you eventually.
• Make the most of the tough times as experience on the ground/in
the trenches, any experience counts-waitressing, store work,
factory work, anything – as it will all help you in any
leadership, management, or advisory roles as you will have
personal experience of what the real issues are.
• Keep going, keep contacting people and keep applying for things
(you need 20 applications for one response) and remember that all
the work you are doing in the meantime which might seem less
fascinating or less important is incredibly valuable too, as only
with that experience will you have the ability to deliver when you
really do end up in your dream job. |
