Paloma JacomeKey Takeaways:
- Perfection is the enemy of progress. In a world obsessed with certainty, Jennifer Motles reminds us that “nobody’s perfect” and that acknowledging imperfection is the foundation of real sustainability leadership. Complex problems can’t be solved from a place of denial or defensiveness.
- Transformation requires collaboration, not isolation. No company (especially one in a legacy industry) can transform alone. Jennifer makes it clear that meaningful ESG progress comes from openness, humility, and cross-sector partnerships that challenge old narratives.
- Intentionality matters more than optics. Sustainability isn’t about looking good. It’s about deciding to move toward the discomfort, the tensions, contradictions, and systems that feel hardest to change.
- Honesty builds trust and trust builds change. Jennifer’s approach centers transparency: telling the truth about challenges, limitations, and the long-term journey toward a smoke-free future. Because credibility isn't built on perfection but integrity.
- Leading inside tension is a skill and a responsibility. Transformation in controversial sectors demands courage. Not performative courage, but the kind that moves you toward the problem rather than away from it. The kind that says: “This is hard. And necessary.”
What happens when a sustainability leader steps into one of the world’s most controversial industries and decides to change it from the inside out?
In this episode of It Shouldn’t Be This Hard, we dive into one of our most gripping conversations yet with Jennifer Motles 🌻, Chief Sustainability Officer at Philip Morris International. This is not your typical ESG chat. Jennifer pulls back the curtain on corporate contradictions, moral tension, and the messy, high-stakes reality of trying to build a smoke-free future inside a company built on cigarettes. She talks politics, purpose, public health, power struggles, and why honesty (NOT perfection) is the only path to real transformation. If you’ve ever wondered what courage looks like in sustainability leadership, this episode is a masterclass.
“Cigarettes could disappear if people could look past their differences and actually collaborate on a solution.”
WATCH the full episode HERE.
The Transformation Everyone Said Was Impossible
Jennifer didn’t walk into PMI naïve. She walked in skeptical, fully aware of the contradiction. She even refused to shake the hand of the person who would later hire her.
“I was so judgmental in my self-righteousness.”
Her sister challenged her: If you hate cigarettes so much, why turn down a chance to make them disappear?
So she stepped in. Not because it was safe.. but because it was the only place where change could actually happen.
What she found was a company beginning a transformation of outrageous scale. A commitment to making cigarettes obsolete in 10–15 years… a system-shift as massive as climate change.
And a reality check: A decade later, over a billion people still smoke. Which begs the episode’s core question: Why does it still feel so hard to do something the whole world claims to want?
The Hardest Part Isn’t Technology or Regulation… It’s Us
Jennifer returns again and again to one painful truth: The biggest barrier isn’t science, policy, or innovation. It’s bias.
It’s the unwillingness to sit at the same table with people we’ve already decided are “bad.”
We live in a world that loves moral binaries - good vs. bad, pure vs. impure. But systemic problems don’t respond to binary thinking. They require proximity. Dialogue. Nuance.
The very things we avoid when the issue feels too hard, too political, or too emotionally charged.
Cigarettes, Nicotine, and the Elephant in the Room
This episode doesn’t shy away from the hardest questions: What about nicotine? What about addiction? What about the business model?
Jennifer doesn’t deflect. She distinguishes: Smoking causes disease, not nicotine itself. And if we want a harm-reduced world, we must separate facts from decades of cultural entanglement.
She openly discusses the therapeutic research, the misinformation, and the deeply emotional reactions people have toward tobacco companies even when trying to eliminate cigarettes altogether.
A Human Rights Lawyer Walks Into a Tobacco Company
Jennifer’s background, UN human rights lawyer, diplomat, systems thinker, is the unexpected heart of this story.
Why would someone like her work in a place like this?
Because this is where the leverage is. Because this is where the harm is. Because this is where the change actually counts.
And because she believes something most people don’t vocalize:
“Humankind is kind.”
And that we are capable of doing better even inside the most complicated systems we’ve built.
WATCH the full conversation with Jennifer Motles HERE. And don’t forget to subscribe — more grounded conversations are coming.
Author:
Paloma Jacome
linkedin Paloma Jacome is content lead and Junior Strategist at Grounded. With over 8 years of experience at the intersection of business and sustainability, she has launched and led multiple ventures —including ECOAVSOLUTIONS, local sustainable audiovisual production company in Southern California— before bringing her entrepreneurial perspective to client work at Grounded. She holds a Bachelor’s in Entrepreneurship and a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Innovation from Loyola Marymount University.
Paloma is also an active ambassador and city coordinator for the Los Angeles chapter of Top Tier Impact, organizing events that connect impact founders, investors, and sustainability professionals to collaborate on solving the most pressing challenges of our time.
As part of Grounded’s partnership with rePurpose Global, Paloma represented the agency in the Plastic Reality Project in India, an immersive program designed to experience the scale of plastic pollution firsthand and explore circular solutions addressing the crisis at its source. She is also recently certified in sustainability legislation and regulations for the fashion industry by the Sustainable Fashion School, strengthening her expertise in policy-driven transformation.
Paloma was a core co-author of Grounded’s debut white paper Policy to Profit: How New Rules Can Create Commercial Wins for Fashion—featured in Forbes—and continues to explore how circularity and regulation unlock commercial and societal value.
LinkedIn | paloma@grounded.world
