Ying McGuire is barely two weeks into her role as CEO of Cascale, but she already knows what she doesn’t want to do. Among her list of no-nos: creating change for the sake of change.
“I’m here to protect what already works,” she said from her home in Austin. “I respect what has already been built and I’m very impressed by the caliber of the team, so I want to get a good understanding of the ecosystem and everyone’s strengths and unique capabilities in the coming weeks. I do not partner on slogans; I partner on specific things we can do together.”
McGuire replaces Harsh Saini, who temporarily helmed the multistakeholder initiative for nearly a year following Colin Browne’s departure last July.
Most recently, she served as CEO and president of the U.S. National Minority Supplier Development Council, a New York-based nonprofit that connects certified minority-owned businesses with large corporations. Before that, McGuire led business development at Technology Integration Group, growing the IT systems provider’s international business. She also led Dell Technologies’ indirect procurement and sourcing supply chain teams, increasing the company’s spend with historically underutilized suppliers from $600 million to $3 billion.
But McGuire also brings off-the-books experience that should serve her well at Cascale, whose 300-plus members largely hail from the apparel, footwear and textiles sectors, including brands, retailers, manufacturers, NGOs and academic institutions.
“I actually grew up in the textile industry,” she said.
McGuire’s story began in Wuxi, a city in China’s coastal Jiangsu province, just north of Shanghai.
“I grew up during the transition from Mao’s era to the market economy and, long story short, this industry really lifted my family, my neighbors, my community out of poverty, but I also saw the environmental and social repercussions,” she said.
What’s not on LinkedIn, McGuire said, is that she was involved in her family’s mill until three years ago, when her sister, who was running it, sold the company after the heir to the business—McGuire’s niece—decamped to New York to become a fashion designer.
But McGuire believes other factors helped land her the job. For one, she said, she’s a “hustler.”
“Running an NGO is just like running a business,” she said. “I sit at the intersection of corporate systems thinking and the problem-solving agility of being an entrepreneur.”
McGuire will meet most of Cascale’s globe-spanning operational team for the first time at the organization’s annual meeting in Athens in September. Later this month, she will host a series of conversations with members to better understand how to support them in a challenging macroenvironment marked by ongoing supply chain realignment, evolving sustainability regulations and uneven consumer demand.
“Value is everything for me,” McGuire said. “How do we bring value not only to our members, but to their businesses? To make sure [sustainability is] not a cost center but a business advantage?”
At her Day 1 town hall with Cascale’s employees, she spoke about the “hedgehog concept,” a strategic framework from Jim Collins’s book “Good to Great” that draws on a Greek axiom: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In Collins’s telling, being a hedgehog means operating at the intersection of three circles: what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be the best in the world at and what best drives your economic or resource “engine.”
As an industry convenor, it’s up to Cascale to think like a hedgehog and drive meaningful, measurable impact, McGuire added.
“Our mission has not changed, but this industry will need to continue to evolve; our mechanisms will need to evolve,” she said. “We have done the very hard work of building the plumbing—that is, the universal measurement tools. The real challenge is how we take the depth of the data we have and turn it into business insights for our members that are not just reactive but predictive. And that will require all of us to work together.”
This includes reaching out to her predecessors, including Rick Ridgeway, who co-founded Cascale—back when it was known as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition—while he was vice president of sustainability and public engagement at Patagonia.
“I will tell you more in three months,” McGuire said with a laugh.
