Kendra Morris

Kendra Morris does not sell a technology, and that is what makes her unusual on this show. When I asked her what she actually does, she did not reach for a product or a pipe, she said she is a "champion of water professionals," the person whose job is to remind the people running drinking-water and wastewater systems why their work matters. At the time of our conversation she led Veolia's Northeast Region, around 900 employees, and her pitch was that the human being in the middle of a snowstorm keeping water flowing rarely gets the recognition the job deserves, so somebody senior has to be their cheerleader.

Kendra Morris frames the water sector's biggest risk not as a chemical or a budget but as a demographic one, what the industry calls the "silver tsunami." Her point is blunt: a large share of the people who run these systems will retire within the next five to ten years, and when they walk out the door they take decades of institutional knowledge with them, the undocumented muscle memory of how a specific plant actually behaves. That is the gap she is racing, and it is the reason a regional president spends her time on internships rather than only on contracts.

Kendra Morris's answer is to build the workforce from the ground up, literally from high school. In Connecticut, Veolia partnered with the state technical high schools to bring incoming seniors into its operating plants for a six-week summer placement, then keep them on through the school year, so the next generation meets the career before it disappears. Her frustration is that almost nobody knows the career exists, and that includes the company itself, as she put it, most people in the US cannot even pronounce "Veolia." Water, in her telling, is a hidden offer: a stable, living-wage, thirty-year job that people would take in a heartbeat if they only knew it was on the table.

Kendra Morris noticed a pattern that says a lot about why she does this work. People join water for the wage, she told me, and they stay for the sense of purpose, and when someone does leave for a bigger paycheck elsewhere they often come back, because the better-paid job did not feel like it mattered. She applies the same long view to who gets to lead: she personally coaches high-potential women up the ladder, and she is quick to point out that at Veolia her own boss and the head of the entire global group are both women, which she treats as deliberate proof to a younger engineer that, in her words, this could be you one day.

Kendra Morris came up through infrastructure finance rather than engineering, which is the quiet thread under all of this. She trained at the University of Pennsylvania in city and regional planning, worked at the public-private-partnership fund Meridiam (P3 meaning public-private partnerships, the deals that fund big public projects with private capital), then American Water and SUEZ, before SUEZ's North American water business folded into Veolia in 2022. Since that podcast conversation she has been promoted again, from regional president to CEO of Veolia North America's Regulated Water group, where the same belief now scales across roughly two million people: that you cannot run good water without first keeping good people.

“I am a champion of water professionals who are doing their best every day to make sure we're providing clean, reliable water and wastewater services to the communities in which we operate.”

That is the rare water leader whose scarcest resource is not money or membranes but people, and who decided early that finding, training and keeping them is the whole job.