Title: Driving Sustainable Change as a Consultant: Dayin Chen ‘17

[00:00:06,280] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Welcome to the Engineering Career Conversations. I'm Christa Downey, Director of the Engineering Career Center at Cornell University. 

[00:00:14,240] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: And I'm Traci Nathans-Kelly, Director of the Engineering Communications Program. We are excited to bring you this forum where we will host lively conversations that we hope will inspire you This week in engineering career conversations, we were very fortunate to interview Dayin Chen, who completed her undergraduate at Cornell in operations research in 2017. She just finished a two year MBA at Wharton School of Business. And she's now returned to Deloitte Consulting as a Senior Consultant in the Sustainability Strategy and Transformation Group at Deloitte. Now during our interview, you will hear several acronyms which we would like to clarify before we begin. P and L stands for a Profit and Loss Statement. We refer to the IRA, which stands for the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 in the United States. And she also refers to the Wharton ESG, which is short for Wharton's numerous offerings around environmental, social, and governance platforms. We welcome you and we hope you enjoy this incredible conversation as much as we did. We are so happy to have you here today. And we know that you have done so many things. We've been reading your files and all the information that we have about you. But to start us off, can you tell us what you're doing right now, what's your current work look like and where are you? 

[00:01:43,400] DAYIN CHEN: Yeah, right now, I just graduated a two year business program and started work back in September. So returned to Deloitte Consulting, where I had worked at for four years previously, and returned into a new role in their sustainability strategy and transformation group. My current project is for a beef poultry prepared foods company. They have 50 billion in revenue and my current project is $100,000,000 sustainability project, where they're looking to expand regenerative farming practices across row crops and their beef business. 

[00:02:26,770] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: No small order. That sounds amazing. 

[00:02:31,689] DAYIN CHEN: Yeah, I mean, the primary reason why I came back to my old firm after school and getting a sense of all the different opportunities out there, was that I really want to get a sense of how big companies work and operate and how transformational change happens. Because a lot of it is, the day to day is not very glamorous or as exciting as start-up work. It's less visionary in many ways, and I thought that it would be really important to get experience on the tactical things that current incumbents are doing. So that I can inform myself on whether this is the right trajectory for industry or if I need to leave and do my own thing. 

[00:03:25,790] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Can you tell us what your current day looks like? 

[00:03:28,370] DAYIN CHEN: Yeah, current day, this project is fully remote for me. I work from my home office. I am still technically only 25 minutes from our physical Deloitte office in downtown Philadelphia. I really enjoy living in the city right now. My day-to-day is, I have a pretty standard nine to five schedule at the moment for this client. We are in the process of recruiting farmers to join our regenerative farming program. So we're looking at the customer journey, the farmer journey, we're setting up processes. We're engaging vendors. We're thinking about what data we need to collect, how we're going to collect it, how do we manage this information that is a lot of personally identifiable information. And how do we consolidate it, synthesize it for the company to be able to track their progress towards their own business growth goals as well as their overall company sustainability goals. This company is looking to reduce their scope three emissions as well as their Scope 1 and 2 emissions which pertain to their own value chain. Then they're selling some of these emissions reductions to their other downstream value chain partners. Like the retailers or the fast food companies that purchase their meat products. There's a lot of partner engagement, a lot of data collection. And then the most interesting part to me is thinking about how this work feeds into the overall corporate strategy. We all know meat, especially beef, is a super high emissions intensity product. When we reduce emissions, how do we think about what this means for their overall sales in the next five years? Are we thinking about their business growing or reducing? So,  a lot of different variables, and kind of complicated. Right now, my current job, I don't talk to the CEO of this company, but the leader for our project does. And so they're having those difficult discussions about their long term growth strategy. 

[00:06:04,379] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: It sounds complicated and important, all kinds of processes are in place. In one of our earlier communications, you wrote down that you do a lot of meetings, a lot of setting up of processes, and a lot of creating of journey maps. Can you talk about the journey maps a little bit? 

[00:06:22,980] DAYIN CHEN: For example, one journey map is for the farmer. Generally, for these journey maps, we want to identify the persona of who we're talking about. In our case, it could be like a commodity corn farmer in Missouri with 1,000 acre farm. And they hey have never done any of these "regenerative farming practices" in the past. In step one of the process, document how do we get in touch with them? In step two of the process, we want to document how do we get their interest? How do we build trust with them? How do we get this farmer to be a lead into the top of our funnel for this program? And then the rest of the journey will cover off on enrolling the farmer. So, all the different documentation you need to collect, all the different forms they need to sign. And then later on, how do we track their implementation of these practices? When they say that they're going to reduce the amount of tillage that they do on their farm, we need to send soil samplers out there to collect soil data. We need to do remote sensing of the farm or the farm boundaries to see that the farmer's, the soil, does it look the same as before? Or can you tell that there's been corn residue left on the farm, so that we know that there's been reduced tillage. That's the practice implementation step. Then the last step of this journey would be paying out for these practices. Actually sending the farmer the check. Then, I guess the very last step in the process is how do we re-sign them onto the contract? How do we build a long term relationship? So that's roughly what a journey map looks like. And it can be very visual, but there's a lot of detail that needs to go into each step of the process. And the way you generate those is you have to interview the recruitment lead. You need to have some background or some learning on how this overall experience should look like. You do research into how other programs are run, and then it gets compiled into your own programs. 

[00:09:02,479] CHRISTA DOWNEY: As you're talking about this, you mentioned earlier wanting to explore what's different about working at a start-up versus a very large company. And I'm thinking listeners who have experience with start ups might be thinking that sounds very similar to what I've done. So I'm curious to hear in the time that you've been doing this work, what do you see as the differences? 

[00:09:23,059] DAYIN CHEN: I think the biggest differences are that there are a lot more people involved when you're working for a large corporation. There's a lot more legal, or there's a lot more thinking from a legal ramification standpoint. So all the contracts need to be thoroughly reviewed by the head council. I think there's just, as one expects, a little bit more bureaucracy in the whole process. But you still generally generate the same outcomes, I would think, with just a lot more review cycles in between and ideally, more brain power behind it. 

[00:10:05,199] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: That's a great point. That's a really nice point that you have there. Continuing on that same theme, we wanted to ask you about, what's the most significant challenge you've faced in your work and what do you do to overcome such things? 

[00:10:18,920] DAYIN CHEN: I think two challenges I'd want to highlight. The first is, and this goes across all of any type of job is working with difficult or challenging people. When I first entered the workplace after graduation, I had a challenging time on some projects with very demanding managers or people that seemed very rude or the way they communicated was either hard for me to understand or it felt like they were attacking me in some shape or fashion. And I feel like this is a pretty common experience for people. You don't always love who you work with. What I've learned through business school and just having more time is that everyone's a full human being outside of work. And a lot of it, being motivated at your job, or staying happy with your job, is being able to separate what people are saying about your work, or to you, from who you are as a person. And being able to look at it more objectively. As well as just accepting when this person is like maybe just not a good person to work with or for, which is pretty common. There are a lot of terrible managers out there. Just being able to diagnose that, accept that, and figure out how to transition into the next part of your career in a way that doesn't damage you too much. That has probably been the biggest challenge I've had to overcome. Like my first project at Deloitte, I basically burned all bridges with my project leadership in order to negotiate the next phase of my career. And at the time I was very afraid to do this. I was like, this seems like very bad practice for me to leave when they seem so unhappy with me. And it kind of felt like a double edged sword. They were telling me, oh, we really love your work. You're so important to this program, why can't you stay longer? And sometimes you just have to be a little selfish. And you have to stand on your side in terms of investing in your career. And if what you're doing is not progressing your career in the way that you want after a significant amount of effort, then it does make sense that you have to disappoint some people. After you've done that, you'll realize it's not as scary as you maybe thought it would be. And I've had zero ramifications from that since. I know that's a pretty common thing that happens. I guess that was part one of challenges is working with challenging people. It's just accepting that's going to happen and just having the perspective that the way you communicate with them is going to be different. You just need to know when to cut ties. Part two of challenging issues is more relevant to my current phase of work. I wanted to do sustainability work because obviously climate change, everyone's net zero plans, those are all very relevant and pertinent to society as a whole. One of the biggest questions or challenges of doing this work for a large corporation, for a consulting firm, is that there's always a high probability or possibility of greenwashing. Greenwashing, is making it look like you're doing a lot of work and making an impact when in fact it may not be as impactful and it's just an illusion and actually a net negative for society. So that's something I grapple with a lot is how do you know if something is for real greenwashing or not? Because as a corporation, you know that these companies, or my role as a consultant, is to make sure I'm servicing my client's needs and helping them stand up this program. And while all the best intents went into the design of the program. Because you as a consultant or at my level an employee, do not have visibility into a lot of the long term thinking and the actual implications of all the work. It's hard to have a really concrete, definitive answer to that. And so that's something that I'm constantly reevaluating. Is this work I want to keep on doing, is it creating the impact that I want? Am I getting the skills I want out of this process? And in that spirit, I'm always thinking about the next step of where are my exit opportunities and how do I engineer those opportunities? 

[00:15:34,179] CHRISTA DOWNEY: That's a big question that many are grappling with, many companies are grappling with, how do we measure this work and this impact? And individuals like yourself are thinking about that. I love that you're open about talking about this. So I imagine many of our students, I mean, I know from talking to many of our students that they're thinking about this. How will I go out and make an impact? And how do I know from an interview, a couple of interviews, if this is a position that's going to be a good fit? And if I'm going to feel like I'm making an impact or that the company is making an impact in the way that aligns with what I hope to be doing. And so I'm curious to know where are you going with that? How are you finding people to have this conversation with, communities, partners? What does that look like in terms of aligning yourself and connecting with others who care about sustainability and are trying to figure this out as well? 

[00:16:32,979] DAYIN CHEN: My initial response to that is one, there's a lot of thought around this in academia. And what surprised me about business school was that there has been a ton of research and there is a lot of interest in what corporations should be doing around sustainability. And what's the role of business today if it's not just increasing shareholder value? One of the takeaways I had, or one of the messages that kept being repeated was that sustainability, or making these more ethical decisions, it all still needs to tie back to the dollars and cents in a P and L statement at the end of the year. Because without that, it's really hard to justify to investors, to even your consumers, if you're charging a lot more for the same product because you invest in sustainability. There's research that says consumers generally do not want to pay a green premium. The more helpful takeaway for me from that was that things like reputational damage to a firm, those can be quantified and historically have not been included in a P and L. Damage to all the surrounding societies that your company operates in. For example, like all the human rights protests at the poultry plants. That causes line disruptions that causes an array of profit impacts to a company that historically have not always been included in business planning decisions. And having that more holistic view of a company has meant that companies are able to justify these investments into better business practices and more sustainability driven business practices. I think that was a very roundabout way to address how I'm thinking about sustainability today or ethical decision making today. But it's helped me to rationalize what I'm doing. Because historically we think of sustainability work as being more morality driven and more, there's this perception of the tree hugger. Increasingly what I'm seeing is that most people are driven to it in a problem solving mode and within a degree of moral calling. But they're also seeing that this is a movement in business overall. And that there is financial justification behind it all. And if businesses choose to do nothing or don't react quickly enough, then that is, at the end of the day, an impact to their shareholder value. 

[00:19:43,799] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I think what you're saying here is so important. A few years ago I used to teach engineering organizational culture for  engineers. So they would create these reports that would go out with their annual, you know, profit reports. But there would also be this part of it that would talk about what are they doing for sustainability or the environment or the community. These are not required from, you know, anybody anywhere, federal or local, or anything like this. But almost all of the large companies are doing those statements for the very reasons that you stated. They want to put out there what they're doing, what their goals are, how they're getting close to that while still being responsive to their investors and stakeholders. Really, it's an interesting web around this whole issue. 

[00:20:29,650] DAYIN CHEN: Yeah. And Traci, it's incredible to me how much regulation has actually come out in recent years, not just on the EU side but on the American side. When I was taking a sustainability and value creation class at Wharton, the professors and the grad students were all amazed when the IRA finally got passed last year. They thought it would have never happened, but that was just such a watershed moment for American policy as well as the American business environment. I think that has meant that if you were one of those corporations that had started making meaningful change before things became regulated, that put you in a much better position than all the other companies that are now reacting and having to spend a lot of money on reporting, greenhouse gas inventorying, and everything else. 

[00:21:28,230] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: In a related thing, in my mind, it's related, we're asking people about AI, so let's think about that. In your particular world, how do you anticipate AI impacting what you do? 

[00:21:42,109] DAYIN CHEN: One example is that Deloitte has recently started sharing its own in house chat GPT model. It's still very much in piloting mode. It's not nearly as comprehensive as the real chat GPT because it's only trained on a subset of Deloitte information. But there's a lot of use cases like that popping up where it's theoretically going to make the job more streamlined. Easier for you to do research, easier for you to create presentations. I would say, in terms of future of work, ideally, there's a lot less friction to be able to do the amount of work that we do. On the flip side, I do want to say that despite all the technological advances of late, most of the business world is still very old fashioned, especially at these large corporations. I'm still getting over the trauma of recently learning how some of our clients were printing out PDFs and manually entering them into Excel sheets. And I want to say that that's not a super rare occurrence. And so while AI and everything else will change how we do work, there's still a huge lagging tail that is where a lot of consultancies play kind of cleaning up that end and kind of pushing it towards the median. 

[00:23:27,379] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: That is super interesting. I'm glad I'm not the only one with stories like that. The things we see, sometimes you're like, oh, there's so many efficiencies that we could take here, right? And yeah, my heart always goes out to those folks in those moments. 

[00:23:43,880] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Yes. Switching gears a little bit more, thinking about our students, what do you wish you knew when you were a sophomore? 

[00:23:53,059] DAYIN CHEN: I wish that I had realized that careers are much longer than the immediate job you get after graduation. I had a really challenging time finding a summer internship. So I'm an International student. I went to school in China, Hong Kong, before I came to Cornell. And at the time, the whole process of finding an internship, getting CPT visa, all that stuff was pretty intimidating. I ended up getting an internship in Dubai doing executive compensation consulting. It was very niche thing. I thought, well, that didn't feel very ideal. That's not what I came to Cornell to do. I thought I would have an internship at Goldman or something. And at the time, I didn't feel too badly about it. I was just glad to have something on my resume. But in retrospect, I think I would have, if I had known that careers were 50, 60, even 70 years long after you start college, then I think that would have taken a lot of the pressure off. And I would have invested more in activities like talking to people that were doing the types of jobs that I wanted to do. And being more willing to email people that were CEO's or senior VPs in companies. And trying to find mentors and sponsorship in aspirational roles. I think if I had had that more longer term view, I would have done more of those investing activities in myself. And I wouldn't have thought that that one internship, or those two or three college internships that you have are going to define the rest of your career for the rest of your life, because it truly doesn't. 

[00:25:58,739] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: It doesn't, and I'd love to hear you frame it in that particular way. You know, we ask about the sophomore level because that's usually about when people matriculate, right? They kind of decide on their major, and so it's a big turning point. But having these extra pieces of information, you know, like you just provided, take the long view people. I think it's really helpful to those students who are a little bit more stressed out than they maybe need to be. In that same vein, we were also wanting to ask about what classes, had the greatest impact on you from Cornell or from your MBA. We'd just love to hear what you have to say. 

[00:26:37,760] DAYIN CHEN: The one that's resonated with me the most recently was this course at Wharton that had a really boring name. It's called Legal Aspects of Entrepreneurship. It was one of the most popular classes and the professor has been teaching it for 40, 50 consecutive semesters. This course really felt like it opened the veil for me in terms of how corporate America works, in the sense that we looked at mundane things like the tax structure and how much tax rates differ between being your own business owner and being an employee for a company. We got information about how jobs, especially at large corporations in the past, may have been a source of life-long employment, but increasingly are not. You've seen this trend in the tech industry lately where there have been tons of layoffs in rolling cycles. At my current firm, there have been layoffs every other month. They are, in the words of my professor, arbitrary and capricious and determined by someone in an office, extremely removed from where you work and divorced from the reality of what you do in your job. Having that frame of reference of how hiring and firing works, that has made me realize that a job is just a job. It is not equivalent to your life or you as a person. If you do want to maximize for things like personal wealth, getting a job at a large corporation tends to not be the path you want to take. Or it should only be a very short amount of your career, but it's not going to give you a huge amount of personal wealth in the long term. That comes from being your own business owner. Other than building wealth, I think the second part is being able to create an impact. It's very hard to control the scope of your work at a large company. That tends to be generally determined at levels beyond you. So working in a smaller company or being your own business owner, that tends to give you the most job stability as well as the most autonomy to do what you actually find fulfilling and impactful. So all of these things, yet I still work at a large 100,000 person consulting firm, this goes back to my point about how careers are long. No career decisions are irreversible. My longer term plan three years down the road is I would love to leave consulting. And right now I'm here because I want to get this experience in sustainability transformation. And I want to get reimbursed for my business school tuition. But three years later, I would love to get more smaller company experience working in the climate tech space. And ten years down the road, I would love to be a chief operating officer at a company. And being able to oversee not just sustainability, but all aspects of how you run the business and drive growth, but also be a responsible marketplace actor. So that's how I'm thinking about my career. 

[00:30:40,049] CHRISTA DOWNEY: That leads into the next question I was wanting to ask is, we often ask, how do you stay current with information in your current field? And I'm thinking for you as well, how are you saying current with what's going on in the type of work that you want to be doing on the horizon? 

[00:31:00,240] DAYIN CHEN: Well, right now the work that I am doing is already pretty close to the latest regulations. Or trying to understand the latest regulations. And trying to understand the latest corporate movements around carbon insetting and carbon offsetting. To answer your question directly, I've deliberately chosen a project that is a little bit more on the front frontier of what I think policy and business is doing to be able to address those two things at once. In terms of keeping up to date in general, think I would love to continue to be more involved with the Wharton ESG Initiative. They do a lot of business round tables. I read their emails that come out, but with work being pretty busy, I guess I haven't done as much of that keeping up to date as I would want to. I think with the Christmas holidays coming up and having more time to disconnect and take a breather and think about how do I want to keep my knowledge set up to speed and think about more of those interesting and challenging questions that engaged me during school, I want to identify academic resources to stay involved with. As well as better keep track of all the reading materials in the space. 

[00:32:39,280] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: One of the other questions that we like to ask is we're starting to wrap up a little bit here, is if you weren't doing this work, what would you be doing? What did you dream of being when you were a kid? 

[00:32:52,400] DAYIN CHEN: I'll answer the first one first of what else I would be doing. I think realistically I would be in some sort of middle management role in a company doing supply chain operations or growth strategy. And the reason why I am not doing that is because I still think consulting gives you a lot more access to where decisions get made versus being on the receiving end of large corporate strategy implications. It also gives me, I feel a lot more flexibility to hop around between different roles and not feel like I have to spend five years of my life and career at a company in order to be accepted and to be able to drive impact. Then what I dream of doing is I would love to be my own business owner some day. Everything that I do today is evidence gathering and understanding the industry and picking up all the skills that I will be able to use when I want to come out and launch my own endeavor. Because it is really hard to start a business if you don't have a lot of experience or knowledge of an industry or some sort of special sauce from your cumulative experiences. But my dream is to not have to work for other people in the future. 

[00:34:33,760] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: One of the things you mentioned to us before we hopped onto this interview is that you mentioned earlier about there's no irreversible career decisions. And that's such an important point that you've been trying to make. But there are some beautiful words here about lots of decisions are driven by fear in the past. And that sometimes a healthy dose of fear might get you somewhere. Do you want to elaborate on that a little? 

[00:34:59,699] DAYIN CHEN: I was talking to Christa about how when I first got to Cornell, up until that point in my life, I had been very fearful of not getting certain test scores, not getting into certain programs, not excelling in whatever I was doing. And so working very hard was in response to being afraid of the negative consequences of something not happening. And while it got me to Cornell, it got me to the amount of success I had had to that point. I wasn't very happy. And at Cornell, I also felt, at points, I felt very demoralized. I was like, well now what? It was a pretty lonely time for me freshman and sophomore year. And what I've learned now or what I meant, I guess my advice would be that having a healthy dose of fear probably helps you if you're really excited to see something work out. And that motivates you. That's amazing. That's what I strive for. Sometimes today, I'm a little bit more complacent about things and I feel like, no, I should really care a lot more about some things, but I wouldn't go back to where I was before where everything was driven by, oh, but if this doesn't happen, that's catastrophic for me. That would be just a bit of my experience is to say that this is a pretty common phrase now, but, what got you here won't get you there into the next phase. That's my experience is that being too driven by fear is not necessarily healthy. But choosing the right things to prioritize that do motivate you and do make you nervous on whether or not they work out or not. That's kind of the healthy balance that I'm trying to pursue. 

[00:37:05,620] CHRISTA DOWNEY: As you're pursuing this healthy balance, what are you doing to relax, have fun, and re energize? 

[00:37:11,880] DAYIN CHEN: I'm manic about managing my calendar these days, so I try to plan out fun things as much in advance as possible. Planning movie nights with friends, planning hiking trips for the weekend. I always have calendar invites. And part of it is driven by necessity. Like my project at work just asked me to tell them my PTO for the next year. If I don't block out that time now, they're going to assume that I'm not doing anything. So part of it is necessity, but part of it is helping me proactively plan all those enjoyable moments and also build up anticipation, and being able to savor all the interesting things that I hope to do. 

[00:38:06,179] TRACI NATHANS-KELLY: I appreciate that insight about PTO being you have to decide what sun you're going to have. A lot to me I'm like I'll go to a play tomorrow, right? But it's really interesting because we don't quite have that structure, right, in academia of anticipating when we want to be on vacation so far ahead. Because a lot of that is pretty obvious. That's an insight I've never heard before and I really appreciate that a lot. 

[00:38:35,339] DAYIN CHEN: Yeah, and part of that comes from this podcast I was listening to. It was around, I think the name, it was an NPR podcast about how to be happy, which is a little depressing, but one of the things they talk about was that we are not taught how to savor things. And a lot of savoring and enjoying the moment does come from building up anticipation. And so, well, Traci, I also try to do impromptu things and I'm choosing projects that give me the flexibility where I know I can plan for tomorrow evening's event. It's also nice to plan those bigger trips and that's so prolong the experience of it. 

[00:39:23,859] CHRISTA DOWNEY: I really appreciate the things that you've shared, the depth that you're going into on some of these topics that people aren't usually talking about in our podcast. And I think students will appreciate it as well. So thank you so much. 

[00:39:36,479] DAYIN CHEN: Thank you both for having me on. 

[00:39:39,179] CHRISTA DOWNEY: Thank you for listening. If you are enjoying these conversations, please follow, write and review on your favorite platform. Join us for the next episode where we will be celebrating excellence and innovation among engineers whose impact contributes to a healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable world.