centerG, Louisville

Situation

In 2011, Waste Management was the largest waste services company in North America, and the Louisville metro was one of dozens of mid-size markets where its brand barely registered outside of the trucks and bins. Louisville was at the front edge of a city-led sustainability push. A mayor had just taken office on a platform that included a compassionate-city agenda and green infrastructure goals. A loose coalition of corporates, non-profits, neighborhood groups, government offices, and universities were independently trying to move green initiatives forward.

I had spent years inside that coalition. I knew the players, their org charts, their processes, and the resources each of them actually had to commit to environmental work. When WM came to the table looking for a Louisville play, the question was not how to run a sustainability campaign. The question was how WM enters this room without looking like the loudest corporation in it.

My proposal magnified WM's awareness inside that network, set up actionable next steps with each partner, established trust, and demonstrated discipline with WM's corporate resources by anchoring the program against the resources every other partner was already bringing.

My context

Three backgrounds were doing the work. Each one let me see or do something the others could not.

ParkerLane. By 2011 I had already worked with most of the players in Louisville's sustainability conversation, on different sides of the table. I could walk into a room with a baseline of trust and a working sense of what each organization actually cared about.

Pattern recognition. ADHD and dyslexia push my brain across categories rather than down inside one. I was not seeing a list of organizations. I was seeing a graph: who connected to whom, where the gaps were, which connections nobody had made because the organizations did not share vocabulary. The obvious play was vertical. Do what other corporates do, bigger. The play I saw was horizontal. Stitch together what was already in the room.

Operator experience. I had built a company and launched non-profits before this engagement. I knew what it feels like to run an organization with hard constraints, which partnerships are worth real time, and what makes a partner trustworthy on a small budget. Leaning on each partner's existing resources was not a clever frame. It was what I already knew would make a coalition move.

Network depth got me in the rooms. Lateral pattern recognition told me what the rooms were missing. Operator constraint-empathy made the proposal something each partner could say yes to.

Learnings

WM was more open to non-template thinking than I expected. The usual story about a large, infrastructure-heavy company is that it pays for a familiar deliverable and resists anything outside the sandbox. That is not what I saw. The executives funded the CNG infrastructure on a real budget and let centerG get ambitious before asking me to scope it back. That reset my assumption about what a Fortune 500 will entertain if you bring a credible path.

Trust is built in small demonstrable actions. The hard part of the Louisville network was not the strategy. It was the time it took for smaller organizations to believe WM was in the room for the right reasons. Wariness of a large corporation is rational. You do not argue someone out of it. You earn past it, one concrete win at a time.

The same dynamic is now playing out with AI. People are wary of motives, capabilities, and effects, rationally so. You produce a small win: a workflow that gets faster, a report that gets clearer, a decision that gets better supported. Each win earns the next action. That is the work of an AI implementation lead. Not model selection. Not the architecture diagram. The trust ladder.