Note: This story was originally published in December 2023 and has been updated to reflect Sloop’s new role.
Andy Sloop MBA’00 has built a career combining his passion for technology and sustainability. After spending seven years leading Nike’s global zero waste and circularity initiatives, Sloop now serves as Chief Sustainability Officer for the Chilean Cobalt Corp — a U.S.-based company developing critical cobalt resources, a key component in sustainable technologies. Sloop also serves as a strategic advisor to Airbuild, Inc., a climate tech company that uses microalgae's natural photosynthesis process to capture carbon, generate energy, and filter wastewater.
Twenty years after earning his Willamette MBA, Sloop was able to take a Lean Six Sigma course with Professor of Operations Management and Information Systems Henry Bi through Willamette’s MBA for Life program. Bi’s course teaches a systematic, data-driven approach to continuously improve manufacturing and other processes, drive quality, and eliminate waste. The MBA for Life program enables MBA graduates to take select classes tuition-free for life. Sloop passed the American Society for Quality’s Certified Six Sigma Green Belt exam at the end of that course and highly values what he learned.
“I’d been wanting to do Lean Six Sigma for a while,” Sloop began. “It has very practical applications in my work.”
Lean Six Sigma (LSS) focuses on process excellence, Sloop explains. “Every process has variation in it, whether it’s ordering a cup of coffee at Starbucks, making a pair of shoes, or a medical procedure.”
While at Nike, Sloop led the development and implementation of global strategies for reducing and recycling waste from all of Nike’s contract factories. The valuable process management skills Sloop received from Willamette were a perfect fit for his role there. “It definitely gave me language, mental models, concepts, and tools that I didn’t have before,” he said, adding that the strategy felt intuitive to him. “Now when I talk to people who have gone through similar training, we have a shared approach and language for improving processes and systems.”
A lot of what Sloop and his coworkers do, especially in a large, complex organization like Nike or Chilean Cobalt Corp., is identify strategic opportunities to improve sustainability performance at scale and then identify who can catalyze that change. Many such opportunities entail driving more consistent manufacturing process excellence. Sloop added that he “focuses on long-term systems improvement, not narrow, short-term wins.” Sloop maintains that “you can’t do sustainability alone — it’s inherently a team sport. You have to cultivate allies and be able to find alignment across stakeholders.”
Sloop values Willamette’s dual accreditation in business and public administration and believes it is a good program for people who are interested in working at the intersection of the public and private sectors.
“The Willamette MBA teaches fundamentals that are transferable and applicable in a lot of different contexts,” Sloop said. “You need to be able to apply management principles to a lot of different contexts when you’re working in sustainability.”
