James Gowen is senior vice president, Supply Chain Operations and chief sustainability officer for Verizon. Since taking on these complementary roles in 2009, his team has enlisted more than 51,000 Verizon employees in 50 countries around the globe in helping to reduce the company’s environmental footprint while increasing the efficiency of a growing enterprise.

Gowen has been deeply involved in the advancement of innovative and sustainable technologies and recently spearheaded the launch of Verizon’s flagship $137M green energy initiative which enabled Verizon to eliminate 20,000 metric tons of CO2. Gowen also oversees other green initiatives being implemented across Verizon including the introduction of a carbon intensity metric, paper suppression, waste reduction and recycling, and management of end-of-life-cycle material recovery.

In his supply chain role, Gowen leads centralized operations including regional distribution centers and the global customer premises equipment program with responsibility for over $10 billion in annual through-put. Gowen also has responsibility for Verizon’s Global Manufacturing Operations, producing customer premises equipment deployed to Fios customers.

Most recently Gowen spearheaded the start-up of Verizon Services Ireland Limited in Dublin, Ireland. He was responsible for transitioning 15 billion dollars in annual spend for strategic sourcing of Verizon’s Network and IT operations. Over 70 industry professionals were hired and a state-of the art center of excellence was built under Gowen’s leadership in less than 7 months.

Having held several positions of increasing levels of responsibility at Verizon, Gowen was the lead architect of the company's supply chain strategy and led the strategic shift from a fixed to a variable inventory business model. While in corporate sourcing, he led the implementation of Verizon's eProcurement effort, and the standardization of Verizon's supply chain systems.