Green Digest Interview Series: Sorouch Kheradmand

This week’s read time: 6 minutes

Welcome to the Green Digest Interview Series, our new 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.

The insights presented in the Green Digest Interview Series are brought to you by a partnership between Green Digest and The Sustainability Circle, the invite-only community empowering senior sustainability leaders through peer-to-peer professional development. Check if you qualify for membership here.

PROFILE

This week’s guest:

Sorouch Kheradmand

Global Head of Sustainability at Schneider Electric

Sorouch is a senior global executive for Schneider Electric, where he manages Sustainability for its whole business ecosystem. He has had various experiences, starting his career in R&D before leading large strategic projects (M&As/divestitures) and later on large commercial teams. Passionate about Sustainability, he made it his career and tries to show ways businesses can harness it to grow and outdo their competition while having a positive impact on People, Planet, & Society.

On top of his current job, he often writes, talks, and exchanges around Sustainability. Sorouch is also a non-executive director and advisor to several companies playing in the Impact/Sustainability space. An INSEAD MBA graduate, he shares a lot about his learnings and decisions on LinkedIn and through speaking engagements and is always keen to engage with professionals and volunteers in the space.

THE INTERVIEW

What inspired you to focus on sustainability, and how did this path lead you to your current role at Schneider Electric?

On the more personal side, I always saw sustainability as a topic of interest but never understood how I could reconcile this with my work, in which I am passionate about business and shared value creation. During COVID-19, and as my wife was pregnant with our first son, I intensely explored the space, speaking to 300 professionals in the space, and discovered ways to reconcile business, P&L management, customer satisfaction, and innovation with Sustainability. This has become my calling since then.

I want to help shift the mindset that the business world has about sustainability and show how we can make it a powerful profit driver so that capital and energies are mobilized to enable those profits and help solve the climate crisis we are facing.

The key question is: how can we ensure everyone understands what they can do in the journey to net zero, in alignment with their own needs, to release energy and maximize impact?

As the Global Head of Sustainability, what does your role at Schneider Electric entail?

My mission in Schneider Electric is to empower as many businesses as possible to start their sustainability journey and make it profitable, be it through their own decarbonization, or that of their customers.

As we transition into a Net-Zero world:
1. Regulations are increasing, such as the CSRD and its equivalents.
2. Customers are becoming more and more concerned about their supply chain’s sustainability status.
3. Risks related to climate change and its acceleration (i.e. supply shortage or energy price increase).
4. Emergent customer needs will also appear which offer a path to differentiation & profitability.

Any CEO in the industry should ask himself how these trends will impact his business and how he can make his business not only resilient to these but also turn them into opportunities. We, however, see roadblocks to adopting this mindset: for instance, Sustainability knowledge is today out of reach for many companies that cannot afford to have a dedicated person looking at sustainability and, even less so, a Chief Sustainability Officer. Not to mention, many CEOs do not see Sustainability as an easy-to-access topic and even less as a potential profit driver.

We may not have all the answers, but we have more than enough to start. I inspire myself from our own transformation (Schneider Electric was recognized as the world’s most sustainable company) to define pathways that are easy to consume and apply and advocate for companies to start their decarbonization journey or support their customers in doing so while making a profit and making their operations more efficient.

This entails the creation of our Schneider Electric Sustainability School, as well as a simple and user-friendly SaaS offer for Decarbonization (Zeigo Activate), or helping SMEs deliver consulting services and support their customer’s decarbonization journey. On top of this, we offer tangible solutions that enable companies who went through the above journeys to generate energy and carbon efficiencies to truly enable their decarbonization journey or that of their customers in a way that is beneficial both to their carbon footprint and their P&L. We also have programs around Circularity or data transparency among others.

Could you walk us through a typical week in your position?

Every week is different from another, depending on the priorities. But I will always try to strike a balance between a few core tasks: 

• Staying up to date with the latest regulatory & innovation trends

• Work with our teams to manage our portfolio of solutions, being closely in touch with sales teams and customers.

• Exploring new partnerships that can enable our vision and create shared value.

• Communicate internally on the work we do, winning support from key senior leaders & field practitioners in the organization.

• Promote what we do outside – the message that we bear needs to be heard for business owners and leaders to adhere to it. I am quite present in media and have a quite active LinkedIn account.

I also always make sure I secure some time for self-improvement, be it with reading, coaching, or training and upskilling. Being in Asia makes it a bit more tricky to manage your personal time when you have a global role, so I also very intentionally protect some time to spend with my family and my two little kids.

How does Schneider Electric help other companies enhance and improve their sustainability efforts through its portfolio of solutions?

The beauty of a company like Schneider Electric is that we have an extensive portfolio that takes part in the active management of assets, be it buildings (hospitals, hotels, or offices), data centers, infrastructure, and plant and manufacturing. On top of what I am building with my teams and our Sustainability consulting arm, we offer solutions that help our customers collect, track, and monitor their assets to make decisions that improve the usage and efficiency of these by providing data-driven insights through our EcoStruxure platform.

On top of that, Schneider Electric is also strongly invested in circular solutions, be it by helping our products in the field be used for a longer time, be easier to repair and maintain, but also by offering the possibility to do “take-backs” of older products, and offering our customers in Europe to buy products sourced from the circular economy, with a carbon footprint that is very significantly reduced versus a new product. All those make Schneider Electric a very exciting company to work for if you see Sustainability as a very important topic for your career and personal development.

As we’re still at the start of the year, what sustainability trends do you think will shape 2025?

The coming enforcement of the CSRD, even with its simplification and some expected delays in its enforcement, is still a major step in accelerating the adoption of double materiality assessment by companies and by waterfall to their ecosystem of suppliers. Companies have been preparing and requesting information for the reports, and a delay or simplification will not change the dynamic we are in, only slow it down a little.

Even outside the EU, the CSRD has its own ripple effects with other countries either taking similar steps or asking very intentionally their industries and companies to prepare for a similar kind of disclosure while giving them an extra year or two. Countries like Thailand or Vietnam are for example part of the latter example, and this just shows how this trend is now accounted for, which is great news.

The 1 million dollar question I ask myself is how can we help those companies to actively work on their decarbonization in a way that is business-friendly and profitable to maximize speed while avoiding as much as possible greenwashing.

Other than the above, there are many trends to watch, such as:

• the maturity of green financing

• new technologies that enable decarbonization

• the rising focus on topics other than decarbonization – be it plastic/waste recycling and management, water usage, or biodiversity.

With significant shifts in the global landscape, what do you see as the key challenges facing sustainability professionals today, and what advice would you offer to help them navigate these obstacles?

One of the latest major shifts is obviously the election of Donald Trump and his administration, which has not prioritized climate change. This has led to several companies withdrawing officially from their commitments but we still see a lot of action on the ground in the US, where each state has its policies on climate. 

On top of that, other geographies such as Europe, Australia, and China are still very committed to their decarbonization commitments and in leading technologies for the green transition, and I have recently seen a similarly strong message from the ASEAN.

Regardless of political swings, business owners and leaders only want to ensure two things: the profitability and the long-term viability of their company. This is where I think our vision of enabling sustainability as a competitive advantage is a key narrative to get out there, together with the tools and education to make this transformation a no-brainer and get energies freed to work on the transition we all need.

Addressing such challenges can feel daunting. How do you recharge or draw inspiration outside of work to maintain your motivation and focus?

I think we can all agree that getting into the Sustainability space is a work of passion. With the challenges and difficulties we face, we must not forget that not everyone is passionate about this and sees it as a key issue to solve. It’s our role to help others not only understand the issue but also understand what small steps they can take to help the change as well as what they have to gain from it.

I see this as a key battle to unlock capital, resources, and energies to accelerate the change we need and do so while creating wealth and jobs, ensuring a just transition. Greenshaming was needed to bring awareness; now is the time to help businesses take the right steps and help them do so in a way that benefits them. I also truly enjoy working in the Sustainability community, which is highly collaborative and gathers a very wide variety of profiles that helped me grow and thrive professionally and personally.

And with these inspiring words, we bring this conversation to a close. A heartfelt thank you to Sorouch for sharing his wisdom, passion, and invaluable insights with us!

PARTNER WITH US

Increase your brand awareness and visibility by reaching the right audience and target market. Showcase your company, solutions, services, products, reports, surveys, events, or other content in front of our highly targeted audience of +4,000 Sustainability & ESG professionals. Contact us at [email protected] if you think we can partner in some way.