“How do you get where you want to be?”
October 7, 2025
I open this month’s blog with a personal reflection on the courage and patience it takes to implement systems change. I’m inspired by the passing of the great Cornellian and great Canadian, Ken Dryden ‘69, this month. He was not only the greatest human ever to play goaltender in ice hockey, in my opinion, but — because he became an author and statesman, including a Member of Parliament and Minister in the Cabinet — he embodied the values of the other-centered, modest, and purpose-driven leader that we celebrate at Cornell and our College of Business.
Yes, he was the key to the 1967 NCAA Men’s Ice Hockey championship team, but he went on to win a mind-boggling six Stanley Cups out of the mere eight seasons that he played (all with the Montreal Canadiens, my beloved childhood team – yes, even as a boy growing up in Vancouver). Ken Dryden BA 1969 backstopped the Cornell Big Red to the 1967 NCAA championship and to three consecutive ECAC tournament championships, winning 76 of his 81 varsity starts.
Other-centered, purpose-driven, he was also a thinker and an educator, dedicated equally to hockey and learning from the start. As an undergrad, he was an honors student, and a member of Cornell’s Quill and Dagger club for “exemplary undergraduates who have shown leadership, character, and dedication to service.” He went on to earn a law degree at McGill University in 1973, to become a hockey commentator (color guy to Al Michaels’ call for the 1980 “Miracle on Ice”), and a lecturer (teaching a course called Making the Future at McGill and University of Calgary). In 1983, he wrote a book, The Game, easily the best hockey book ever written, a reflective and provocative tale of a life in hockey and of the importance of the game itself. He was a lover of words, ideas and commitment. Liberal party statesman, Minister of Social Development and a Member of Parliament for York Centre, he was dedicated to improving care for seniors and children.
Ken Dryden’s deep intelligence, wisdom, and curiosity have inspired me since I was a young boy, so this month’s blog will be peppered with pearls of wisdom from Ken Dryden (Dryden-isms?). I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
On effecting systems-wide change
“I try not to reinhabit myself; it’s much more fun to try to inhabit something new and something next.” (On his own re-reading of the 1983 book The Game, in order to add a 30th anniversary chapter.)
I think a great deal about what it takes to change a system, and this Dryden-ism is compelling – the idea of being willing to “inhabit something new and something next.” Last week I had the privilege of bringing together teams from Accounting for Sustainability, the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business to make a collective offering to NYC Climate Week 2025. Our topic: systems change.
We brought together four recent winners of the Finance for the Future Awards (from sustainable finance, banking, and carbon analytics) with panelists (from academia, media, and climate finance) to talk about real experiences creating systems change. Brilliant and courageous and disciplined practitioners all, these people are laboring in the trenches to bring transparency and efficiency to financial practices that can support the climate transition. Such vital, energized thinking and action.
The F4TF honorees each gave a seven-minute “lightning talk” about a key challenge they’re facing. Mark Campanale, Founder and Director of the think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative, evaluated pension fund long-term risk calculations. Marcos Lima, Head of Sustainable Finance at Banco BV, works on internal communications strategy between CFOs and CSOs. Doug Hull, Advisory Director of Finance Earth, talked about his firm’s work accelerating funding for nature, climate, and communities. Manuel Leon, Regional Head of Proparco’s Mexico, Central America and Caribbean office, outlined this development bank’s investments in sustainable industries.
After the talks, panelists included BrightWorld ESG founder Linda Giuliano MBA ’02, Financial Times Global Education Editor Andrew Jack, A4S Executive Director Brad Sparks, and my SC Johnson College faculty colleague Sarah Wolfolds who held a round-robin discussion about the communication strategy, leadership innovation, and constant collaboration required to promote systems change.
“A leader’s job is to improve things for people.”
We all have a responsibility to move the needle, and every person in the room last Tuesday takes it seriously. I asked the panel: Does it take a heroic amount of leadership to lead to innovation?
Linda brought eyewitness reporting from the front lines. Responsible investment concepts and commitments really amped up about 15 years ago – and Linda’s quick to acknowledge the progress she has seen since the start of her career, when “the CFOs weren’t even in the rooms” where corporate sustainability goals were being discussed. They certainly are now. When Linda began her storied career at AllianceBernstein, she undertook a listening and information tour with 15 clients, introducing the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment and patiently explaining, across their skepticism and resistance, that these were potentially profitable investment suggestions, not rules forbidding anything. (European and Australian pension funds were very open to impact investing. The US pension funds? Not so much.) “It took quite a while,” Linda said, to get investors to take these innovations seriously, “because investors by definition are skeptics about everything and they need to have data that proves every single point. And so it really was a journey that took place over 10, 12 years of my time there, of talking to them, but more importantly, talking to clients and prospects and learning about their expectations.”
Andrew Jack is a quietly powerful systems change maker. In addition to upholding the media’s table-stakes responsibility to inform the public accurately when a company or industry experiences a crisis, he can be credited as global education editor for a profound effect on business education well into the future, building ESG considerations and workplace equity policies into the FT’s rankings criteria, and steering the FT’s growing body of business school teaching cases for sustainable and responsible finance.
Brad Sparks observed that for systems change to happen, leadership has to give finance and accounting teams permission and support as they experiment and innovate, observing that leadership at Banco BV must be open minded and confident in their teams. He also acknowledged Carbon Tracker does a good job in being a challenger of large accounting firms and their practices; this is part of their leadership.
Linda and Sarah both picked up on experiences with leading collaboration, which frequently involves bringing together the right teams and the appropriate information into focused “cross-functional discussions.” Externally, said Linda, “when you marry what your clients are looking for with what you are doing,” reminiscing about a clinical example of a major company sourcing clean water, “it really helps you develop a strategy on how to approach it as an organization, to be authentic.” Sarah noted that last year’s Dyson School’s Grand Challenges teams, a program over which she is director, developed models for bringing internal teams together within a major pharmaceutical company to fine-tune the representation in a drug study.
Our Cornell Convenes events help build knowledge-sharing relationships that build trustworthy progress. This event certainly met that bar.
“How do you get where you want to be?”
I asked everyone present: What can we do better? They all had examples of ways to partner, to bring research into action, to amplify and share the knowledge created.
Andrew Jack held academia’s feet to the fire, for its “narrow definitions of success,” but then allowed that educators can “start by thinking about and engaging with external players to define and work on research, and then two, to disseminate it to the audience of practitioners…to not only do the right sort of research and wider outreach, but also embed that fundamentally in the teaching to that next generation.” Brad Sparks commended the expansion of impact thinking in coursework, but advised more “integration of sustainability matters into the accounting curriculum,” specifically in equipping accountants with a comprehensive understanding of the materials, the sustainability related risks, and the ways these are being embedded within the financial statements.
Linda Giuliano serves on the Johnson School’s Advisory Council, and brings so much practical knowledge into the education space. She thinks we can still do more in “making business education more innovative and accessible, in programing, driving, and embedding responsible principles throughout the curriculum.”
My colleague Sarah Wolfolds pulled it all together. “We do a great job of funding our own faculty research, at giving students practical skills they can use in their careers, and in bringing practitioners into work with them.” (True!) “But we can do better at integration, in bringing the takeaways into a broader audience and into action. And we can do better at making our students comfortable with ambiguity.” Well put, Sarah!
As a leader, I’ve been focusing on objectives and transparency about results. Curiosity and love of learning go hand in hand with strategy, data, and communication in bringing new practices and attitudes together inside companies and organizations (including colleges and schools of business).
At times it seems the SC Johnson College itself is a wonderful case study in systems change. I’m very motivated by our college’s collaborations with the Atkinson Center in which science researchers work with MBA students to address complex problems. The Dyson Grand Challenges students regularly partner with different types of external organizations, last year with the National Association of Conservation Districts. Our Nolan students earn hundreds of hours of practice credit working in the service industry and are trained to think selflessly of others in every way.
“It’s fun to try to figure things out. There’s always a reason why something is. Everybody makes sense to themselves; it’s your job to try to figure out what their sense is, not to assume that their sense is your sense.”
I agree with Ken! This NYC Climate Week event was an experiment and it brought so many people together. Audience members included founders of ESG nonprofits, managers of global education initiatives, co-workers of lighting speakers. We had time after for good conversations after the event, conversations we’ll continue to promote.
And I couldn’t leave without mentioning:
A grateful shout-out to faculty members Lourdes Casanova, Asis Martinez-Jerez, Mark Milstein, and Sarah Wolfolds for completing the “triple-play” of this project: working in teams with the F4TF awardees, they’ll be creating teaching cases based each company’s challenges. We plan to share their work in publication and in shared demonstrations teaching these lessons in real time. Stay tuned!
