Lynelle Cameron, the Conscience of Autodesk

As much as we glorify and promote technology, our conscience forces us to also be aware of its unintended consequences. For too long, technophiles have counted only technology’s benefits while discounting its environmental and societal costs. We have marveled at the latest automobile, aviation and military technology but have been slow to admit the pollution and deaths associated with them. We have praised the automated warehouse and forgotten the green field it replaced. We enjoy our smart homes with their Internet of Things (IoT) appliances while our streets are lined with the homeless, the jobless and the disenchanted.

It may be easy for observers of technology to be woke—to wake up one day with a conscience. It is perhaps harder for the creators of technology to do the same. Unless the creator of technology is Autodesk.

With our soul searching, it was only a matter of time before we came face to face, as it were, with Autodesk’s Lynelle Cameron. Cameron has, as one of her many titles, the VP of Sustainability. She is also the head of the Autodesk Foundation, the charitable arm of the publicly traded company. Given these roles, Cameron embodies the social and environmental conscience of Autodesk.

We Zoom in on Cameron in her backyard in San Rafael, California. The stage could not have been better set for a head of sustainability. The garden surrounding her is green. We hear songbirds. The sun is shining. Cameron has been working from home, as have most of us, during the COVID-19 pandemic. In normal times, she be at Autodesk’s Market St office in San Francisco.

It would be nice to conduct interviews in person, but we’ll have to wait. We put up with Zoom—and a connection to a router that is a bit too far. The router is maintained by Cameron’s husband of 20 years, David Cameron. He is not the former prime minister of the UK. We asked.

Cameron earned a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology from Vermont’s Middlebury College and a master’s in environmental science from the University of Michigan. She may never have imagined that the journey would lead her to the corporate world and Autodesk, as big corporations are at worst bad guys on the third world stage, and at best they are deep pockets for aid-providing nongovernment organizations (NGOs) to pick. She could not have predicted that she would end up at Autodesk, but as we will see, her position at the design software giant puts her in a great position to follow through on the idealism of her youth.

But coming home from college with degrees in anthropology and environmental science, Cameron was greeted by a less-than-understanding father. “What the hell are you going to do with that?” stormed Dad, a math teacher and principal, somewhat annoyed at a daughter who would not be able to “make a contribution to the world,” despite his constant reminders.

Sustainable development was the idea that we need to change how we’re living on the planet so we don’t compromise it for future generations. Now, how do we do that?

At that time [my graduation], this work was being done in the nonprofit sector. For several years, I worked in Nepal with an organization called the Mountain Institute. It’s similar to World Wildlife Fund, which I also work with. They understand that mountain people, mountain communities, even though they are some of the poorest people in the world, they are stewards of globally significant resources.

“I am in San Rafael," she confirms, laughing as she signals for her husband, David Cameron [not the former prime minister of the UK – we asked], to adjust the router. “Is this any better?”

I was working in the Himalayas, the Andes in the Appalachians, Kenya and other places. I was getting an understanding of resource economics fundamentals. How do you help people benefit economically as stewards of resources? While in Kenya, I read The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken, which, to simplify, says business has to be part of the solution. I read that book in one weekend and applied to business school [at the University of California, Berkeley] the next weekend. That was the pivot from the nonprofit sector. I had been working with Tibetans, Nepalese and other communities on resource conservation and economic development only to realize that the problem is downstream, in the halls of the corporate sector, back home in my country. That is what led me to corporate sustainability and that is where I have been for the last 20 years.

More and more companies have a sustainability lead. It’s often a vice president. More and more often, it’s a chief sustainability officer (CSO) or a chief impact officer, and I expect there will be more chief resilience officers. The roles have followed the trend of sustainability reporting and impact reporting. More and more, companies have to measure performance, set goals and report on these annually, and that is usually led by sustainability teams like mine.

It’s about 30 people. But I like to say I have 11,500+ on my team. That’s the number of Autodesk employees. We may think about sustainability teams, but [what] we’re really doing is setting strategy and enabling all parts of the company to contribute. The 2021 Impact Report—truly 150 people were critical contributors to that. The report spanned everything from diversity to inclusion and culture to travel and events and other customer-facing occasions.

I went from business school to HP. Hewlett and Packard founded that company. They had the “HP way,” which involved citizenship and ethics. That resonated with me. At that time, sustainability was still not a word anyone understood. In fact, I wasn’t allowed to initially name my team using the word “sustainability.” It was the era of corporate responsibility, citizenship … different than a top-line business opportunity tied to sustainable business. So, my team was called “environmental strategies and solutions.” I had to flip one of those s-words to sustainability, and when the time came, that’s exactly what I did.

Those were the early days of what we think of now as product stewardship—thinking about where the products come from, the supply chain and where they’re going at the end. HP, in the business of ink, was thinking about how to design disposable plastic cartridges, about how we design and make printers, computers and servers to be continually upcycled in a circular loop instead of the linear waste model.

Autodesk has opened new offices (300 Mission Street, San Francisco) that are LEED Platinum. Was your office involved in that?

Absolutely! Our facility team leads and drives all that work. We started our sustainability work by looking internally at Autodesk’s footprint. When I joined the company, we didn’t have LEED certified buildings. It was early days. We were not using our own technology in the redesign of our office spaces. Doing that was key. We needed to lead by example. That work is done by Autodesk’s facility team, but my team supports and assist them, more in a consulting manner.

Almost all of our buildings are LEED certified. San Francisco may have been the first place we got LEED certification with a retrofit interior. Now, when we bring our customers to our offices and advocate for green building practices, they can see we practice what we preach. We needed to be able to demonstrate how we use our technology in the design of our own buildings. That extends from our offices to travel to events. For example, events we do in Las Vegas, like Autodesk University. We’ve been net zero with those events. We are working with the exhibitors to do the same, as well as helping them beyond Autodesk events. We have worked out a partnership with United [Eco Skies Alliance] where along with alliance partners [HP, Siemens, others], we pay a little more for sustainable aviation fuel when we travel.

Yes! We are super proud of being net zero! It was over 10 years ago we realized that the business corporate sector needs to set climate targets aligned with the science. That is what led us to science-based climate targets (SBTs) being discussed today. Back then, we set a target to reduce our emissions and aligned it with goals for 2050, relative to our contribution to the GDP. Pretty wonky, but the point is we made a target and hit it 10 years later. Next target was to be net zero. We wanted to be careful not to just keep emitting and offsetting, but to be thoughtful about reducing emissions, then offsetting the reduced amount. A year ago, we completed it and we just announced it in our 2021 report. We reached net zero across our business and value chain in 2021. We have already set our next science-based target.

So, yes, we are net zero. But we have to remember, Autodesk’s environmental footprint is small. We should be able to be net zero. We are a software company. We are not a manufacturing company. But we are in a position to help our customers, who have much bigger environmental footprints. That was the strategy behind the 2021 impact report—to lead by example, to lead our customers and to lead across industries. That’s the main thrust of why we became net zero. So, even though we are deeply proud of it, what matters most is that it shows a path for our customers to become net zero. That’s where the greatest impact lies.

When we think about each of our industries, our focus is on materials and energy. Of course, materials and energy are deeply interconnected, both in AEC and in the manufacturing space. The manufacturing industry is responsible for 19 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. We are very much thinking about how much material is needed, about lightweighting … especially in the transportation sector. In aviation, using less materials equates to using less energy. We are also thinking about the energy consumption of the products that are made and the manufacturing processes themselves. How can we alter the manufacturing process to use less energy? We’re thinking about energy consumed by creating the material. None of this is easy. There are trade-offs between these factors. Trade-offs are why we are in the situation we are in. For example, you could optimize for low carbon and end up with a highly toxic material which hurts human health either up the supply chain or in the U.S. or abroad. Our technology is working towards helping customers make better decisions about how much material, energy, what kind of energy goes into the product. Increasingly, that will be part of our platform technology.

That is the Holy Grail of sorts. We have early versions of brand products that go there, which I cannot disclose at the moment. They will do exactly that. What users of our software need is a widget, a tool that indicates red, yellow or green. That work is happening right now with the Fusion team. They are deep into that. We know we need to get there.

Way back, we formed a partnership with Granta Designⁱ There is more recent work that my team is doing with the Fusion team, specifically thinking about energy, materials and circularity. We’re seeing a lot of movement in the design and manufacturing space that is helping our customers think about circular materials.

I don’t think they went away. In fact, there’s a whole section in the 2021 Impact Report about sustainability in the design and manufacturing space. You can learn more about how generative design is fundamentally a sustainability tool by itself. It will create parts that have less material. Some of our innovative customers are actively innovating on types of materials. I’m thinking of WNDR Alpine, which makes skis out of microalgae. There’s truly a lot of innovation happening.

Plastics certainly are one of the many grand challenges we’re facing. We do have technology in Fusion 360 that is helping users avoid 3D print failures so that you are printing only what you need and waste is radically reduced. We need not only to reduce plastic but also have better types of plastic. Plastic innovation can make sure plastic doesn’t end up in plastic gyres but is a continuous loop. I don’t think plastics are going to go away, but we must innovate and make better plastic materials.

There is a massive amount of waste in the world from the construction site. There’s an obvious business opportunity. Less waste increases the bottom line. That’s obvious. But people don’t realize the carbon density in waste. Out of a partnership with Skanska and Microsoft came the realization that 50 percent of a carbon footprint of a building is in the materials and that’s determined before the construction starts. The operation of a building over its lifetime is the other half. The raw materials for the building material have to be extracted, building material has to be shipped to the construction site. One of the things we are working on is EC3, an embodied carbon calculator. Yes, we can reduce waste. That takes some of the carbon. But more significant is helping designers and architects understand material decisions and the carbon footprint consequences of those material decisions. That’s the kind of carbon content technology you’re asking about in the manufacturing space and what we’re working on in the construction space.

You are addressing the speed of change in the construction industry. Frankly, 10 years ago, I didn’t expect it to work, the way the business and economics were at the time. But I am amazed at how quickly the industry has embraced the idea of embodied carbon. It is because of the business benefit, the direct savings in that. You’re also speaking about the speed of digital transformation happening in construction. You’ve probably talked to Andrew [Anagnost] about COVID dramatically accelerating digital transformation [We have; here it is. -Ed]. Digital transformation is serving to radically accelerate what we can accomplish.

We’re not so much in the business of convincing people as we are in trying to help them solve their business challenges and make the best decisions for their business—which includes energy and materials and increasingly, designing for health and resilience and some of these other areas. One of our approaches as a company, and for our team, has been trying to turn the big ship. That is our industry, whether it is construction or manufacturing. One of the ways that we do that, in keeping with the analogy, is by sending out speedboats.

The Autodesk Foundation is making impact investments to catalyze innovation that is needed. We are investing in companies that are designing new materials for the construction space or coming up with a whole new approach in each of these different industries. That serves to inspire some of our mainstream industry customers about what’s possible. It’s no longer nice to just have thought leadership. This may be the biggest difference between the last decade and this one. One could argue about having eco software in 2008, when we acquired Ecotect and Green Building Studio. We saw this coming.  But we may have been ahead of the market at that time. It was perceived as an added expense and unnecessary. Fast-forward to now, there’s more regulatory pressure, especially in countries around the world. Investors care more now than ever before, so they are putting pressure on our customers. We researched how many of our customers have corporate-level sustainability goals, many of which are tied to the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. The UN provides us with a blueprint of where we need to go. Many of our customers have goals—ambitious ones—around sustainability. Our role is making sure we’re continuing to innovate, develop the technology and pointing them to the technology that helps them achieve their goals. They have a net zero goal, but they may not know that reducing the embodied carbon in the construction materials is a path to their net zero goal because they’re thinking in terms of energy consumption. We have arrived at a time where we don’t need to make the business case. It’s now more about giving them technology that helps them make better decisions.

We created the Autodesk Foundation in 2014. It was the first foundation to focus on design and engineering. We thought long and hard about having a corporate foundation that is aligned with our core business of design and engineering. The traditional philanthropy model is to support the people and communities. We set up the foundation to impact investing in addition to grant making, investing in the innovation that the world needed and solving some of these major challenges it faced, helping de-risk innovation acceptance. We wanted to use our philanthropic capital as a catalyst to help innovation get to market. Whether it’s designing, like supporting Gradient, a HVAC company designing air conditioning units which are going to be increasingly important around the world to innovations on materials, energy, health and resilience.

We actually have three broad goals—the same three impact opportunity areas for the foundation as we have for the company. In addition to sustainability, which we have been discussing today, there is a philanthropy model. We were giving away a little bit of money but realized there was an opportunity to leverage philanthropic capital as catalytic capital and to structure it as a separate corporation, a 501(c)(3) corporation, which is beneficial for a number of reasons. We have only Autodesk executives on our board, including Andrew and other members of the leadership team.

The focus for both corporations, as was stated at AU [Autodesk University] two years ago. One is energy and materials, with a heavy focus on low carbon innovation. We help innovators get to market and scale. Years ago, we had our cleantech partner program that [was] simply granting software to innovators. Tesla was one of our early cleantech partners. That’s a good story. We helped shape that.

Second is health and resilience. It was a bit of a head-scratcher for folks when we announced health and resilience in 2019 as part of our corporate environmental responsibility. It was pre-COVID. But now people really understand that the decisions made on energy and materials directly impacts the health and resilience of people and communities.

Our third goal was to help people thrive in this new era of automation, aligning work and prosperity. Andrew talks a lot about the future of work and included in that is an idea that we can help more people have meaningful work and prosperity for all rather than for a few. The foundation is doing a lot of work there, as is Autodesk. We treat each area like a portfolio. In each portfolio we measure impact with impact briefs. The fun part is connecting the investment with the impact.

Those are the three areas that the foundation is investing, and the same three areas also guide our work with customers. I present on the foundation’s investments every year. You can find more at Autodesk.org.

Not so many years ago, my role was unique in being responsible for sustainability and a foundation, but I’ve seen more and more companies aligning these two areas. We’re almost playing the role of matchmaker. We’re talking to some of our customers in the manufacturing space about drones, to an air conditioning company, or thinking about renewable energy and connecting that to some of our energy sector customers. That’s where we can really have maximum impact. In the last year, we’ve given away nearly $17 million plus $29 million in software grants. And our employees have donated the equivalent of $1.6 million in volunteer and pro bono consulting hours.

Our philanthropy model historically was fairly traditional. We built our reputation in the communities where we worked. We engaged employees in local giving opportunities, but it was small and not related to design and engineering. Now, all of our giving is tied to helping designers, engineers and innovators, addressing the most pressing needs of our time. By catalyzing innovation. We are interested in contributing to partnerships where we have a lot of value to add. We almost never write a check and that is the end of it. It’s more of who we can partner with and build a collaboration with and who can benefit from the breadth of the Autodesk ecosystem.

I remember Autodesk’s sponsorship of Whistlestop (now called Vivalon), a local charity dedicated to delivering meals and rides for homebound seniors in Marin County. I guess that’s over?

That’s a perfect example of the traditional philanthropic model we had in the past before I took it over and revamped it.

We are now 100 percent focused on projects that can scale globally. Whistlestop, a San Rafael-based initiative doesn’t fit what we’re trying to do. Occasionally we will support a design shop in Myanmar, for example. They may be designing goods for the local market, but we think that’s scalable in other markets. That’s different than a Whistlestop.

Marin County is indeed one of the wealthiest (per capita) counties in a wealthy country, and places like Myanmar, Nepal, other impoverished regions, are more in need of Autodesk’s largesse. Have you had a chance to circle back to the Nepal area, where your journey started?

Nepal specifically? Absolutely. We are directly addressing the twin challenges of climate change and inequality. Nepal had a massive earthquake in 2015ⁱⁱ. We did a lot of work with Build Change, which is designing disaster-resistant homes in different parts of the world.

That is a perfect segue to the foundation’s role in crisis response. The foundation is looking ahead to reduce the impact of disasters and catastrophes. Build Change is a very innovative nonprofit, and they’re doing amazing work, not just in helping rebuild after the Nepal’s earthquake but also by studying the local building codes—how they need to change, how do we redesign communities to withstand future earthquakes? They have embraced advanced technology. They are early in their use of drones and sensors but have taken advantage of technology in remote places like Nepal. We also sent teams of volunteers to Nepal. We have an employee impact program that sends out our most valuable asset, our people, to many of these organizations in the field in a variety of different places to work on design challenges. The foundation’s focus has gone from disaster response to reducing the impact of future disasters with design. The Nepal earthquake is a good example of that.

Let me tell you of a decision I made in the last year to take on the global lead role for our crisis management program in the middle of a disaster [the pandemic] and in the days leading up to a contentious election. Here’s why it’s related to your question. As we look to the next decade, we can see 2020 as a sign of what we are up against in the coming decade. We have global scale challenges ahead. They shouldn’t catch us by surprise. Autodesk has had a crisis management plan. We had a plan for the pandemic, as did other companies. We never thought we’d use it.

Maybe now companies are thinking deeply about what’s next. How is this related to the health and resilience strategy that I talked about? How can I really prepare our company and our customers to be ready for the unexpected and the expected? Whether we are dealing with the pandemic in India, which both Taylor and I are working on right now, or the situation in Israel, or the earthquake that’s going to come, or the inequities that result from these disasters that you allude to in your question….

I think of climate change as our greatest health emergency and a global health challenge, and it is impacting people disproportionately worldwide. With the shifting nature of business these days, no company is immune to big impacts anywhere in the world. That is starting to filter through executive teams and boardrooms. The Autodesk board of directors signed off on our impact strategy because they care about inequity and the impact of disasters in what was once considered far away. Our investors are prioritizing ESG (environmental, social and governance). This is a tidal shift.

Taylor and I both have a role on our crisis management team and we deal with how the company responds to various disasters. Of our global workforce of 11,500+, about 1,200 people are in India. We’re absolutely looking for ways we can support them.

I don’t think we’ll ever go back to quite the situation we had before the pandemic. I think we’ll have a lot more hybrid employees—those that work part time in an office and part time at home.

It’s not easy to say it is better environmentally or worse. Yes, you take out some transportation impact for certain commutes, which does reduce our footprint. We look at that. We try to put our offices on public transit lines whenever possible, so that reduces our footprint. You also have to consider air conditioning and heating all these different homes around the clock now rather than one central office. There’s a lot of efficiencies in an office space. I think we have embraced digital technology, as have our customers. Think about events. Everybody flying to Las Vegas multiple times a year like we have done for many years. That’s going to have to change dramatically. Virtual events are working quite well. There’s new technology to network. We can move from room to room. The workplace is absolutely shifting. But we need to be aware of effects of the shifting. People are just now seeing consequences of working from home—the effect on health and the need for resilience of being in social isolation for the long term. We are social creatures. We have polled our workforce on this subject, and we will be considering the findings in our resilience program.

I’m glad you asked. I have been paying attention to health and wellness in the corporate sector for the last five years, doing little pilot projects here and there, recognizing that the corporate sector in the U.S. (I can’t speak more broadly) is not the picture of health. People work long hours, there’s a lot of insomnia and other concerns. I had been brewing different ideas, talking to third parties about this when the pandemic hit. I have put a person on my team on it full time and asked them to build a program. We need to support our employees … and quick! We had this little window to act. In two months, we managed to launch a resilience learning pathway with resources. Already, thousands of employees have used these resources. We grouped them into three pillars of resilience, 1) social connection, 2) mental wellness, and 3) sleep and rest. We created learning pathways and grew a community of resilience with advocates around the world who started mindfulness chapters and taught. People got focused on how we as individuals build resilience in this tough time to prepare for what’s ahead.

We have to think about resilience from a personal to a planetary scale. How do we help our employees become more resilient? We are in a really tough time, but with the skills they need in the future of work, we can build for the next decade.

That may be a quick summary, but yes, we need an overall resilience, not just a resilience for whatever we’re facing at the moment, but resilience for whatever. I think that will be a power skill of the future. The ability to bounce back from adversity and to persevere, whether it’s an earthquake, another natural disaster, a political crisis, or rising inequality and protests against it…. There’s a lot going on here. And we have to be ready.