Interview Series: Anke Hampel

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Welcome to the Green Digest Interview Series, our bi-weekly feature showcasing conversations with the industry’s leading voices - CSOs, sustainability directors, and other senior professionals shaping the sustainability landscape. Each edition dives into their professional journeys, hands-on insights, and outlook on the challenges and opportunities defining corporate sustainability.

These interviews are designed to be quick, insightful reads, offering you actionable takeaways and a personal glimpse into the people leading the way. Stay tuned for stories, strategies, and lessons that matter to you.

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PROFILE

This week’s guest:

Anke Hampel

Group Head of Sustainability at ABB

Anke Hampel is Group Head of Sustainability at ABB, a global technology leader in electrification and automation, based in Zurich, Switzerland. ABB helps industries - in manufacturing and industry, utilities, buildings, data centers, and transportation - run at high performance, while becoming more efficient, productive and sustainable, so they outperform. The company has over 140 years of history and around 110,000 employees worldwide.

Anke is a distinguished professional with extensive experience across industries including consumer and capital goods. Her expertise includes integrating sustainability into business strategies, decision making and customer value creation through innovation and ecosystem collaboration. With a background in global innovation, sourcing and supply chain management, including at Procter & Gamble and Tetra Pak, Anke has driven significant advances in sustainable practices fostering systemic change, continuous improvement and investor approval.

Learn more about ABB

Sustainability professionals have faced a whirlwind lately, from political shifts to budget cuts and evolving regulations. In your view, where does the sustainability landscape stand today? What’s giving you hope, and what’s keeping you up at night?

ABB's purpose is to enable a more sustainable and resource-efficient future with our technology leadership in electrification and automation. Being a purpose-led company is essential, especially in times of uncertainty. Companies are responding to the shifting sustainability landscape today in different ways. Responses can be categorized by three Fs: Flee, meaning abandon sustainability completely; Freeze, keeping the status quo, but pausing efforts, or Fast Forward. At ABB we are in fast-forward mode, meaning we remain committed to advancing our Sustainability Agenda. For ABB sustainability is not just about doing the right thing, it’s an important part of value creation for our stakeholders. Sustainability is firmly embedded in our business and our people take pride in working in a company that is part of the solution. ABB helps industries outperform or, as we like to say, “outrun – leaner and cleaner”.

Can you give us a glimpse into a typical week in your role as Group Head of Sustainability at ABB? What parts of the role require the most focus and attention?

As Group Head of Sustainability my role, together with a small corporate team, focuses on understanding emerging stakeholder requirements—driving the continuous improvement of our sustainability ambitions and remaining ahead of requirements by integrating them into strategy and long-term performance planning. Together with the Sustainability Council, which includes the heads of strategy and sustainability from each business area, we drive the evolution of our Sustainability Agenda. 

To successfully implement sustainability within an organization, it is essential to integrate it into core business processes and decisions. Communicating with the business in operational terms helps build engagement because it focuses on the business case for sustainability and helps create value. Some topics can be difficult to grasp, but when we discuss impacts, risks and opportunities in business terms supported by data, our teams show full commitment.

Our approach is to understand how we can help our customers with their specific sustainability challenges, for which we are perfectly positioned with our portfolio of sustainable solutions, including offering energy efficiency audits, building and energy management systems, integration of onsite renewable energy and battery-energy-storage-as-a-service solutions. Sixty four out of our top 150 customers have made an SBTi net zero commitment. We are often engaging, along with our divisions, directly with the customers’ sustainability leads to jointly identify opportunities to accelerate their sustainability progress.

ABB operates across highly technical domains with long value chains. What are some internal levers, cultural or operational, that have helped accelerate your sustainability strategy?

Our decentralized ABB Way operating model empowers our divisions to innovate close to our customers. Our focus is on delivering products and solutions that improve our customers’ profitability and sustainability while making their operations more productive and energy efficient. 

Each president across ABB’s 18 divisions has full profit and loss responsibility and is accountable to deliver against group financial and sustainability targets. These are tracked via long-term performance planning and approved by the board. Each division is empowered to prioritize actions within their respective business or technical domain that deliver on both emerging customer requirements and performance targets. This approach to decision-making promotes tailored investments, and our decentralized operating model drives competitive advantage for ABB. To achieve our sustainability ambition, it is essential to collaborate across divisions, to share best practices and to benefit from the interactions with customers that are more advanced on their sustainability journey. Just as collaboration across industries and between customers and suppliers is fundamental to achieving sustainability goals, it is important to collaborate internally via our communities of practice.

How does ABB collaborate with customers to translate their sustainability goals into practical actions and drive joint decarbonization across the value chain?

ABB supports customers in manufacturing and industry, utilities, buildings, data centers, and transportation. 97% of ABB’s total value chain emissions (Scope 3) occur downstream with customers, which is not typical; usually companies focus more on emissions in upstream supply chains via supplier collaboration. On average 70% of value chain emissions are upstream so companies typically invest in additional procurement resources to drive decarbonization.

For ABB, however, our sales teams are the ones working with customers on value creation while driving joint decarbonization. We do not need to redirect all our efforts because we already engage with our customers in line with our purpose. Emissions that occur during the use of ABB products require decarbonization of the energy used throughout their lifetimes. As such, key objectives for reducing value chain emissions focus on grid decarbonization, innovation to drive energy efficiency, and customer collaboration to help them to run leaner and cleaner. Our circularity commitment also helps us focus on product decarbonization with the use of recycled content, designing out waste, extending product lifetime and offering take-back options.

To end on a personal note: What practices or principles help you stay focused and energized while leading through the complexity of today’s sustainability challenges?

My purpose is to inspire positive change by bringing passion together to create a bigger positive impact than would be possible alone. This is what gets me into my flow. That’s why being close to our customers – working alongside our divisions - to understand unmet needs and challenges is so energizing. It is motivating to be part of business conversations and together find innovative solutions to problems that have not been solved before. The complex challenges of sustainability simply cannot be solved alone and it’s energizing to come together to discover solutions that you can only find with partners in the wider ecosystem – for example on circularity. 

I greatly enjoy life-long learning to stay on top of the latest developments and thinking, for example with the Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Leadership, Yale and IMD. I highly recommend checking out getsmarter.com for inspiration. I also enjoy being a trainer, using, for example, the Climate Fresk which has the aim of raising awareness of the root causes of climate change and the impact on planetary boundaries.

While others are fleeing or freezing, Anke Hampel and ABB are fast-forwarding — showing how bold leadership meets complex sustainability challenges head-on and reminding us what true commitment to sustainability looks like. Thanks for reading, we’ll meet here again in two weeks. 🟢

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