In this episode of We All Make Mistakes, Professor Ben Voyer welcomes Ava Jorgensen, a Master’s student in International Sustainability Management at ESCP Business School and president of Oikos Berlin, and Erik Olsen, ESCP Bachelor alumnus, entrepreneur and consultant.
At different stages of their careers, both have made professional choices shaped by a desire to contribute to something larger. Together, they discuss what working for the greater good looks like in practice, from keeping sustainability from becoming a box-ticking exercise to staying motivated when change takes time.
Where the desire to make a difference begins
For Olsen, that desire started early. At 14, watching The Motorcycle Diaries, Walter Salles’ film following a young Che Guevara’s journey across Latin America, made him reflect on the head start he had been given in life. “In that moment,” he says, “I started wanting to leave something better behind me.”
That idea has followed him from management into climate tech, entrepreneurship and his current work supporting small and medium-sized enterprises.
Jorgensen’s path developed more gradually. After gaining professional experience in sustainability and renewable energy in the US, she saw her client base begin to shift towards areas including data centres and other infrastructure. It prompted her to reconsider where she wanted her career to go. “This doesn’t feel aligned with my personal values right now,” she remembers thinking.
Her decision eventually brought her back to Europe and to ESCP, where she saw an opportunity to combine technical sustainability skills with business training.
When idealism meets reality
Working in sustainability also means confronting the distance between ambition and what organisations are ready to do.
Olsen experienced this at Klimato, where clients could have very different reasons for engaging with sustainability. Some wanted to reduce emissions; for others, “a lot of it was just about ticking the box”. Rather than dismissing those clients, he learnt to start from where they were, build trust and try to move the conversation further over time.
Jorgensen points to another challenge: facts alone do not necessarily persuade people. “Sometimes when you give people a lot of facts around sustainability, it can also scare them away,” she says. “It can feel like something so unreachable to actually make a difference.”
For both, creating change therefore requires understanding the people you are trying to bring with you. That might mean translating sustainability into the priorities of a particular organisation, choosing which battles to fight or making the scale of the challenge feel manageable rather than overwhelming.
Finding other people who share those ambitions matters too. Both guests highlight the value of communities, conferences and professional networks as places to exchange ideas and regain perspective when progress feels slow.
Planting small seeds
One of Olsen’s most enduring lessons came during his first ESCP internship, working on financial inclusion for small and medium-sized enterprises in Mexico.
On his first day, the CEO offered him some advice: “We’re not gonna change Mexico. We’re not gonna change the world, but what we’re doing here is planting small seeds.”
The message stayed with him. His advice to young professionals today is similarly pragmatic: hold on to your ideals, but recognise that trying to fight every battle immediately can make it difficult to keep going.
Jorgensen has heard a similar lesson during her Master’s. Climate change is too vast for any one person to solve. Instead, one of her professors encouraged students to find their niche and concentrate on the part of the problem where they can contribute.
For both guests, working for the greater good becomes less about finding one perfect role or making one enormous intervention, and more about understanding where you can make a useful contribution and continuing to make it.
As Jorgensen puts it: “It adds up when everybody makes a small change.”
Whether you’re trying to align your career with your values or wondering how to keep your idealism when change feels frustratingly slow, this episode offers a candid perspective from two people at different stages of that journey. Tune in to this episode of We All Make Mistakes with Ava Jorgensen and Erik Olsen for the full conversation.