James Boyle

James Boyle - Jim to nearly everyone who works with him - is the founder and chief executive of Sustainability Roundtable, Inc., a Boston advisory that has spent more than fifteen years embedded inside the sustainability teams of some of the world's largest companies. From an office at 1 Beacon Street, SR Inc advises the likes of Akamai Technologies, Biogen, Cisco, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Wayfair on the unglamorous mechanics of corporate sustainability: governance structures, renewable energy procurement, greenhouse-gas accounting, and the organizational resilience needed to keep programs alive through changing political weather.

The firm's founding idea is deceptively simple. Instead of each corporation paying full freight for its own sustainability research and benchmarking, Boyle built a model where members share the cost of that work through a roundtable. Competitors, in effect, pool resources on questions where there is no competitive advantage in each reinventing the wheel - how to structure a virtual power purchase agreement, how to set a science-based target, how to report progress credibly. It is a collaborative posture that runs against the grain of how consulting is usually sold, and it has helped SR Inc work with close to 100 Fortune 500 and growth companies.

SR Inc is structured as a for-profit public benefit corporation and a certified B Corp, meaning it is chartered to weigh social and environmental good alongside profit. For a firm whose entire product is helping others become more sustainable, the structure is less a marketing flourish than a statement of intent - the company is legally bound to the mission it sells.

Senate offices, courtrooms, brokerages - then climate

Boyle did not arrive at sustainability in a straight line. He began in politics, taking a graduate internship in 1991 on the Labor and Human Resources Committee for Senator Edward M. Kennedy, then joining Senator John F. Kerry's staff the following year. He worked on Al Gore's presidential campaign. In 1996 he served as a federal law clerk, drafting opinions for a U.S. District Court judge, before becoming an attorney at the Boston firm Mintz Levin, where he advised on real estate and environmental matters.

In 2002 he moved to the commercial real estate giant Trammell Crow Company as a vice president in Corporate Advisory Services. He led the firm's Greater Boston market team and later co-led Corporate Advisory Services in San Francisco, earning the Commercial Brokers Association's Platinum Award along the way. It was that combination - law, environmental practice, and the hard economics of buildings and real estate - that set up the founding of SR Inc in 2009. Sustainability, after all, is often won or lost in the energy and design of physical space.

Putting dignity first

In June 2026 Boyle published Dignity First Leadership: Developing & Driving a World-Class Sustainability Strategy, co-authored with Anna E. Whitney. The book arrives at a moment when ESG has become a political lightning rod, and Boyle's response is to reframe the whole conversation. Rather than defend acronyms, he argues for a model of leadership that centers human dignity within value creation - and lays out a six-phase change-management approach for building sustainability strategy that can survive backlash and uncertainty.

He describes the work as “a scientifically grounded framework for what comes next - a more realistic and effective model for executive, enterprise, and economic leadership that centers human dignity within value creation.” The sustainability strategist and author Andrew Winston called it “a fresh and necessary human perspective for corporate sustainability leaders.”

What he has built

There is a fitting geography to all of this. Boyle lives in Concord, Massachusetts with his family, near the Emerson House on the route to Walden Pond - the stretch of woods where Thoreau went, in his words, to live deliberately. A century and a half later, Boyle spends his days trying to convince the largest companies on earth to do something adjacent: to act deliberately, and durably, on the environment they depend on.