Fortune Staff

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

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Cummins, a manufacturer of diesel and natural gas engines, supplies the horsepower for trucks made by Paccar, Volvo, Daimler, and Ford, among others.

legacy

Cummins

cummins

Says Jennifer Rumsey: “I’m the right person for the job.”

 Cummins's first female CEO is leading the way to net zero

Leadership

Jen thank you so much for joining us and congratulations on your new job. It's been three months now since you became ceo of comments and you're also the first woman to leave this 100 year old company. And even though cummins has been around for many, many years, it may not be a familiar name to many of our viewers. So tell us exactly what does cummins do. We got our start and diesel engines uh, and providing diesel engines. I like to describe what cummins does as serving some of the world's most demanding and economically vital applications. While our roots are in diesel, we provide a range of power solutions today that are powering many applications. We all rely on for our day to day life, whether it's trucks that are moving goods across the country to serve all of us. It's busses that are taking our kids to school or many of us around cities, construction and agriculture equipment or power generation. Many of us rely on comments and the power solutions that cummins provides to serve our everyday well. Ever since you became Ceo, you've been very clear on your goals. You want to steer comments towards cleaner alternatives to those diesel engines you were talking about and you want to reduce carbon emissions at all of your operations and facilities by the year 2050 you call the plan Destination Zero. Tell us how you plan to get there. It's an exciting and challenging time. Climate change is a real issue and cummins believes that we play an important role in addressing the challenge and growing our business as we do it. Destination zero is our strategy to Dick carbonized our industry. Um and we believe that to do that we need to start today by reducing CO two of engine based solutions. While in parallel we're accelerating and advancing solutions like battery electric and fuel cell electric powertrains that can get us all the way to zero. So how do you rate the company's progress so far? Are you on track to hit that goal of zero? Yeah. The work that we're doing right now towards our destination and zero strategy. We're investing a range of solutions that we think will be required in. And you see that and many of the announcements that we're talking about today are fuel agnostic platforms. Our investment in battery electric solutions, fuel cell solutions. Those will all be key to meeting that destination zero strategy and our goal of getting to zero. And we have a long history of doing this susie. In the last 20 years, our innovation not only has grown our businesses resulted in more than a 90% reduction in criteria pollutants from the diesel engine and we've been improving CO two for our customers through fuel efficiency improve in particular in the last 10 years with our first environmental sustainability plan. So I'm quite confident in the work that we have ahead for us tell us about this new hydrogen combustion engine that Cummins is developing and maybe some of the other products that you're working on to advance your decarbonization plan. One of the key innovations that we've announced this year is what we call a fuel agnostic platform. Our customers want to de carbonized and they're running a business. So the cost of these solutions is important. And and by introducing this fuel agnostic engine platform that can move from diesel to other fuels like renewable natural gas or hydrogen engines, they can begin to decarbonization their their fleet, their equipment in a way that makes the most cost sense to them as well. I understand that you were a huge a quarter of the climate change bill that was signed into law not long ago. How will that help you and comments to innovate all of these new technologies that you're talking about and also to reach your climate goals in week one as Ceo, I did have the opportunity to participate in an event with President biden uh speaking in support of the climate change provisions in the inflation reduction act. And we think that there's some key provisions here that will start to drive adoption of these new technologies. So tax credits for customers that are purchasing these low and zero carbon technologies that frankly are just too expensive today otherwise for them to start to adopt and to create that certainty for us that we can launch those and start to scale manufacturing of those solutions And then on the infrastructure side as well, tax credits and incentives to build out a charging infrastructure and a hydrogen infrastructure is critical. Well let's pivot and talk a little bit about the economy because that may impact a lot of these big plans that you have for comments. You've been optimistic about the outlook, you reported strong financial results recently, record earnings and revenues and you told investors that you expect this trend to continue through the end of this year. But to what extent are you concerned about the slowing economy not only here in the U. S. But around the globe that could disrupt your growth plans? Certainly these economic indicators with higher inflation and and and interest rates growing up are concerning the underlying demand is still very solid for us right now because customers have a lot of pent up demand. They've been using this equipment really hard for the last 18 months and two years and have not been able to replace equipment at the rate that they would want to. So we continue to see strong orders in U. S. Trucking, we have a strong backlog and our power generation business. Um and we're watching these indicators for potential softening as we go into next year but right now that that outlook remains uh solid. What are you doing to prepare for a possible recession every week? We hear about new predictions. A recent KPMG poll of ce Found that 91% of them believe a recession will hit the US economy in the next 12 months if they're right. What are you doing now to prepare for that? We are always thinking about what are the actions that we need to take to to scale back to reduce overtime to prioritize our investments to use downturns as as opportunities to strengthen the efficiency and effectiveness of our company. Um and we'll be prepared to do that as needed. All right, so let's talk a little bit more about you. You made news when you were ranked on Fortune's latest list of the most powerful women in business and you also have the distinction of being one of the few women running a Fortune 500 company who has a background in technology and engineering. You've got your degree from M. I. T. How has your engineering background and your many leadership roles? That comments really prepared you to lead the company? Yeah, well certainly I'm very honored and proud to be the first woman ceo at comments. But what makes me feel really good susie is that I'm the ceo that comments for this time because I'm the right person for the job and that background in engineering as well as business experience really positions me well as the company navigates this decarbonization change and what that means for our industry uh, and for our own business. Um and so you know that that focus that I've had in my career of really leveraging my technical experience, passion for building strong teams and then delivering results makes me really excited about what's ahead for comments. You told investors when you became a Ceo, that your predecessor Tom Linebarger was one of the most significant influences in your career and when it comes to leadership, in fact you described him as your coach, is there anyone special leadership lesson he taught you? And that has guided you Tom has been an amazing leader for comments. He's invested a lot in my own development. The big impact that he's had on me is helping me see what I could become, the reality is for women. Uh, sometimes they don't believe they can do certain things because when you look around, you don't see others that look like you and it can question if you belong. And I'm very fortunate to come um from a one a home, we had a strong role model in my mother for work ethic and determination and I had to really influential people in my career, coming tom being one of them and jOHn Waller, former Ceo or Chief Technical Officer. The other that helped me see my potential and invested in me to reach it. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about investing in diverse talent and really, um paying that forward to others because there's so much talent out there, if we can unlock it, we can really do great things well. Exactly. And you know, and now it's really your turn to do just that because you can bring along a whole new generation of female leaders, especially ones who like you have a scientific background, What are you doing in this regard to bring along women at comments and what leadership lessons are you teaching them just by being in this role. It it has motivated women and cummins. I know many of them have talked to me and and I have always appreciated the opportunity to, to mentor and coach and to give advice to other women inside the company and also outside the company. For example example, last week we celebrated international day of the girl and come and focus on women in stem. We brought a number of high school youth from our community into one of our plants and I spent time talking to them about the opportunities in stem because it's also about creating a pipeline of talent. We need more diverse talent that pursue stem education and careers and then we need to invest and help them achieve their potential um once they arrive