Asha Baskaran

I've been in my field for 29 years and have worked across five different spaces throughout my career. I started in architecture, building schools and hospitals, then moved into finance. I set up an outsourcing location for Target in India back in 2006, which has grown from a startup to thousands of team members over the past 20 years. I then worked in store design for Target's retail business, followed by assets protection on the operations side. Currently, I'm in supply chain, again on the operations side, where I've been the lead program manager for sustainability programs for the past 2 years. In this role, I lead two programs for global supply chain at Target: sustainability and reverse logistics. My day-to-day involves helping the business focus on the right things, ensuring there's enough governance across the business to hit key milestones and mitigate risk. I work on both short-term milestones and long-term planning, looking out 3 to 4 years to 2030. Some of my proudest achievements include that India capability I started, watching it grow and become well-integrated despite oceans and time differences separating us, and designing Target's first net zero store in California with all the innovation and technology that went into it. We remodeled it in 2021, and before that, we did a sustainable site with stormwater drainage and innovations to reduce water usage.