Key takeaways
- Cassandra Garber’s former employers embrace 3M, Coca-Cola and Normal Electrical.
- She constructed the sustainability workforce from scratch at medical provide firm McKesson.
- Garber was at Dell for 4 years, most lately as chief sustainability officer.
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Cassandra Garber is leaving her publish as chief sustainability officer of laptop agency Dell Applied sciences to tackle the identical function at automaker Normal Motors.
Garber’s first day at GM is Earth Day, April 22. She succeeds Kristin Siemen, who retired Oct. 31 after a 30-year profession with the corporate. One among Siemen’s prime lieutenants, Kathi Walker, has been performing as interim CSO at GM.
Garber disclosed her choice to commerce “keyboards for dashboards” in a publish on LinkedIn that recalled hours spent visiting her grandfather’s radiator store whereas rising up in Huntingburg, Indiana. In her new function, she’ll drive GM’s zero-emissions automobile transition technique and round financial system enterprise practices that scale back waste throughout GM’s provide chain.
“If there’s one factor I’ve discovered throughout my profession, it’s that sustainable enterprise is wise enterprise,” Garber wrote on LinkedIn. “Decreasing threat, seizing innovation and progress alternative WHILE delivering actual and significant affect is the place it’s at. It’s onerous, however when completed, and completed properly, it’s transformative for each enterprise and our world.”
Garber is constructing on a powerful basis, though GM and different automakers face an unsure future amid the Trump administration’s unpredictable commerce tariff technique.
GM managed to scale back tailpipe emissions 3 % between 2018 and 2023. The corporate lately posted its greatest first-quarter gross sales since 2018, together with a 94 % enhance in EV purchases.
Big selection of expertise
Garber joined Dell in August 2021 to overtake the corporate’s environmental, social and governance technique — with the aim of embedding these metrics extra deeply throughout the enterprise.
“In slightly below 4 years we’ve reinvented the whole ESG group, built-in it throughout the corporate, innovated in merchandise and packages and processes, streamlined and prioritized our focus, had a significant affect in so some ways, and we’ve celebrated the superb people who made all this occur,” she stated in one other LinkedIn publish.
Garber spent 10 years at Normal Electrical in communications and advertising and marketing roles earlier than shifting on to sustainability management roles targeted on reporting and strategic initiatives at Coca-Cola Co. and 3M. She additionally constructed the sustainability workforce at medical provider McKesson from scratch.
Dell didn’t reply to a request for remark about its plans to exchange Garber.
