We caught up with Yasmina in mid-September over Teams. She has spent more than 20 years leading strategic transformation in large organizations, including six years at AWS (Amazon Web Services) leading Sustainability & Innovation engagements in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In that role she sat with the executive committees of some of the largest companies in the world. At the end of last year she left to found her own advisory firm, Success Private Counsel. We asked her what boardrooms she supported in her 20 years career taught her, how she decides where she can have the most impact, and what keeps her hopeful. Here’s what she told us.
The same problems everywhere
Yasmina has worked closely with more than 300 organisations, in sectors ranging from aerospace and agriculture to insurance, media and gaming, and has accompanied more than 140 executive committees at CEO level. “Those were probably the most formative years of my career. You learn something in every single meeting.”
What struck her most was how similar the problems were.
“Whatever the sector, the questions and the challenges were essentially the same. And what was missing almost everywhere was a structured way to be creative.”
I asked whether she’d ever encountered a business where sustainability simply couldn’t add value. “Not yet. I have always found it.” In her view, the tools to do things differently already exist. “Today, technology allows us to do almost anything. So the real limit in sustainability is no longer technical. The first limit is creativity. The second is courage: having the conviction to make the decision.”
Less complaining, more proposing
Yasmina is candid about a habit she sees across the sustainability profession. “There is one thing in sustainability today that I find counterproductive: a lot of complaining, and very few proposals. We complain about the climate, we complain about social issues. Bringing solutions is the hard part. And it leaves the whole burden on one group of people, the business owners and decision-makers. That isn’t fair, because we all own this.”
How to have more impact?
I told Yasmina this is something I’ve grappled with myself. Do you stay where you are and make progress ever-so-slowly, or move somewhere you think you might have more impact? And how would you even know?
Her answer: there is no single right choice. “This is where you have to act under uncertainty. The way I do it is not the only way, or necessarily the right way. Each of us has different DNA. If your mission is to impact a million people over the next fifteen years, you can do that by staying in your role and making sure that every person your company serves benefits from it, one by one. Or you can decide to build another business, fail ten times, knowing that the eleventh attempt will be the right one, and that one will reach a million people. It may take the same fifteen years.”
“So it is a deeply personal decision. It doesn’t have to mean taking big risks. But it has to be aligned with your vision and your ambition, and it has to be something you are comfortable with.”
People, not software
When I asked about tools, Yasmina said the ones she relies on most “aren’t software at all. They are methods that activate the human energy already present in the organisation. That energy exists in every company I walk into. It is simply dispersed, and pulled in opposite directions by people who are all convinced they are right.”
She points to Gallup research suggesting only around one in five employees worldwide feel engaged at work. “I find that staggering. It means roughly four out of five people go to work every week without real energy for what they do. That is an enormous amount of untapped potential.”
She sees a role for AI here, taking repetitive admin off people’s plates and freeing time for work that matters to them.
“AI accelerates people, but purpose is what fuels their energy. You can see it in their eyes the moment you start talking about sustainability.”
But she is also clear about where AI does not belong. “I would not use AI to raise my children or to teach them about the world. I want them to experience things the way I did, because what made those experiences extraordinary was that they were human. I don’t want human connection to disappear.”
Who gets a seat at the table
Yasmina came to sustainability through business. “My background is business and transformation. Before AWS, I spent eight years as an independent consultant, leading cloud implementations and transformation programs inside very large companies.”
She doesn’t hold a sustainability degree, and some people have made sure she knows it. “I don’t have a master’s in sustainability, let alone three, which I have heard mentioned in some rooms. People must listen to you, but the subtext is: I have three master’s degrees in sustainability, who are you?”
Her response is to make the room bigger. “The more diverse the people we bring into the room, the faster we will move.”
