James Gowen Bio

Jim Gowen is a change agent. Since taking on the complementary roles of vice president of Supply Chain Operations and chief sustainability officer for Verizon in 2009, he has enlisted more than 6,000 Verizon employees around the globe in helping to reduce the company’s carbon footprint while increasing the efficiency of a growing enterprise.

Gowen focuses on working with vendors and business partners to drive efficiency into the supply chain. Under his leadership, Verizon was the first company to establish energy efficiency standards for network equipment, which had an impact on the entire industry. He has also introduced a variety of programs including a carbon intensity metric, fuel and energy reduction, 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 more than $2.5 billion in annual through-put and half a billion dollars in annual inventory.

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.

Gowen earned his master's degree in business administration from Long Island University and his bachelor's degree from Manhattanville College.

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