WILD GEESE:Niall Dunne Chief sustainability officer, BT Group, London

NIALL DUNNE describes himself as “not a traditional greenie”. Though he runs to work, has a worm farm at home and sources his food locally, he’s mindful that his green credentials don’t frighten anyone off.

“I believe that if you paint yourself as part of the green movement, you don’t get the opportunity to work within the heart of business and really drive change,” he says. Appointed chief sustainability officer at BT last year, the Dubliner is all about changing things from within.

Dunne first left Ireland in 1994 when, having represented his country at athletics, he was granted a scholarship at Manhattan College to study finance. There followed a Masters in computing at Colorado State University, but Dunne admits: “At that stage in life, all I cared about was running.”

He moved to Atlanta to train for the Sydney Olympics but when he didn’t make the final qualifying time, he decided to move on.

“At the end of all of that, I owned so much money that I needed to get a real job,” he says. And the word from home was that things were picking up.

“All my friends had started to get really good jobs. They were working with dotcoms and using words like ‘share options’,” he recalls. “They seemed to be buying houses in nice neighbourhoods and going to all the right restaurants and I thought that sounded like a really nice way to live.”

Lured home, he took a job with Accenture where he spent 10 years helping clients get into better shape. Transforming businesses and returning them to profitability however, he felt many had a blind spot when it came to longer-term risks. Contributing to problems like oil and cotton scarcity and escalating food prices, he knew businesses could one day fall foul of those sins. Collaborating with colleagues to form Accenture’s global sustainability practice, his aim was to foster more resource-efficient business models.

While clients “wanted to have the conversation”, he says, for many, green issues just weren’t that pressing. When offered a role with advertising agency Saatchi’s sustainability arm, Saatchi Saatchi S, Dunne recognised another avenue through which to achieve his green goals.

Moving to London to take up the post of managing director of the company in 2008, he says clients including Walmart, Proctor & Gamble and Toyota offered a conduit for change.

“Every week 250 million people shop in Walmart and it has 1.5 million employees. The Proctor Gamble brand touches four billion people every day … so when you want to make a difference and it’s an obsession for you, you want to go where there are large outcomes,” he says.

“Walmart has 60,500 suppliers. If it sets a strategy that really takes this into the heart of the business, that can lift an entire business eco-system up with it.”

He describes his stint with the agency as a time when “social media was driving a train through how the world markets”.

“Ad agencies were going through a process of reinventing themselves to market ‘with’ a much more networked and informed consumer rather than marketing ‘at’ the consumer,” he says.

Headhunted by BT less than a year ago, as chief sustainability officer, his job is to lead the company’s worldwide climate change and sustainable development strategy.

He was most attracted by the fact that BT was a technology company.

“The models for growth that we have depended on, basically since the industrial revolution, are now failing,” he says. “They are failing to provide for seven billion people and they will continue to fail to provide for 10 billion people.”

“About 80 per cent of the food we produce on the planet never makes it to a human mouth,” he says. “It’s really about driving those inefficiencies out of supply chains and enabling transparency so that companies can make really smart buying decisions. All of that is going to be enabled by technology.”

And with the BT network “the single largest machine on the planet”, he feels the company is well positioned to lead the charge.

BT itself has set a target to reduce its own carbon emissions by 80 per cent of its 1997 levels – a target it is more than half way to achieving. And in developing its own wind and solar renewable energy sources, using fewer buildings and procuring green energy from suppliers, it’s not just saving the planet but saving money.

In the past three years, the company has driven down its energy bill by almost 3 per cent. As one of the largest users of energy in the UK, it’s brought the company around £14 million in savings.

Of BT’s business customers, Dunne says those in China in particular are keen on green.

“You can distinguish yourself in the ‘request for proposal’ process there by talking about being the most energy efficient network in the world and about the water footprint of our technologies,” he says.

“Being able to talk about setting targets and partnering with government in China around resource utilisation, that’s top of the agenda over there.”

Ultimately Dunne feels that those who “get it” will steal a march.

“The leading businesses get the fact that this is the next great industrial revolution and there will be winners and losers this time around too,” he says. “You can see some of the winning behaviours emerge and you can also see those that won’t be with us in five or 10 years time.”

To crown his green credentials, Dunne has just been nominated a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He describes this as “quite humbling” but also an opportunity to network and get things done.

So has the emigration experience been positive for him?

“You look back at the Angela’s Ashes era and you think, ‘wow, how difficult was it for those people’,” but with cheaper travel and Skype, he says things have fundamentally changed.

“The world has come a long way from emigration being the end of relationships, in a way it can be an enhancement.

“I think I’m a lot more interesting to my friends than I was before I went away – I certainly have a lot more to talk to them about. I would just say follow your dreams and take a global view.”