President & CEO Anthony Kane Celebrates 10 Years at ISI

Looking back on the collaboration and drive that shaped Envision

Currently with more than 170 verified projects, ISI’s Envision Framework is increasingly well recognized as a tool to improve sustainability performance on civil infrastructure projects of all types. Back in 2014, however, the prospects looked very different. Envision was a new venture, and the future was anything but certain.

In those years ISI had to take risks, rely on early supporters, and benefit from serendipity more than once, Kane recalled at a recent staff celebration marking his 10-year anniversary at ISI. Dozens of projects in every infrastructure sector are now using Envision to achieve their sustainability goals, he said, “So it is remarkable for me to think that when I joined, the number of completed projects was small enough that I knew all of the projects’ team members personally.”

Kane was a research associate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in the early 2010s, joined ISI in 2014 as VP of Research and Development, and transitioned to Managing Director in 2016 before being named President & CEO. During the celebration, he was praised for his passion and his ability to support and lead Envision throughout its formative stages and beyond. One of the comments collected for the occasion, from long-time ENV SP Kari Hewitt, Chief Regeneration Officer and Partner at Planning Communities, LLC, captured the general sentiment well: “Your leadership and dedication to ISI and Envision is an inspiration to those who have the pleasure of working with you and is critical to the transformative impact that Envision is having throughout the world.”

ISI also benefitted enormously from the firms, agencies and individual champions who shared the vision. The willingness to sacrifice and to take a chance on something new — qualities held by Envision advocates and benefactors like Paul Zofnass, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) and its faculty, ISI’s parent organizations ASCE, ACEC and APWA and their leadership, and ISI’s first board of directors — were absolutely critical to the success of Envision, noted Bill Bertera, ISI’s President & CEO when Anthony joined ISI.

The “magical confluence” of factors that led to Envision, as Kane calls it, feels only more exceptional with the passage of time. That a university research group (based at Harvard’s GSD) and a non-profit (ISI), both already well along in their own sustainable infrastructure initiatives, would agree to work together on a single initiative that eventually became Envision seems incredible now. But the collaboration, which also included ISI’s three parent organizations, was fueled by a desire to share efforts and make sacrifices for a greater good, Kane underscored.

ISI is many times its former size, and manages projects and initiatives that span the globe. But the starting point for that growth was Envision’s scrappy startup phase, which in retrospect offers a powerful lesson on how vision, collaboration, and perseverance created a path forward for sustainable infrastructure development.

“People took chances on ISI because there was something worth taking a chance on. People could see it, companies could see it, local governments and agencies could see it,” noted Bertera. “That was very important in giving us time to build the space to allow us to be successful over years. Anthony was so much a part of that.”