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For Roger Martella, the aroma of baking bread is a signature scent of sorts. When Martella was 5, his father bought an Italian bakery down the street from their home in the Philadelphia suburbs, then enlisted the family to help run the shop.

“I started working there from as long ago as I can remember. My first job was counting to 12 and bagging rolls,” says Martella, chief corporate officer of GE Vernova.

He worked at the bakery, off and on, into his early 30s, filling whatever role was vacant, be it baker, delivery driver, sales representative or manager.

The small business was a training ground for Martella, who has served as general counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and as principal counsel for complex litigation for the Department of Justice’s Natural Resources Section. At GE Vernova, he works with public and private sector leaders from around the world to solve challenges related to energy affordability, reliability, security and sustainability. 

Martella recently presented the 2026 Ferguson Family Lecture at the Nicholas School of the Environment. Ahead of the event, which was also part of the Nicholas Dean’s Leadership Lecture Series, Martella chatted with the Nicholas School about his career path, his work philosophy and what advice he has for Nicholas School students as they chart their own futures. 

How did your bakery experience shape your approach to work?

When you have a family bakery, there’s no dividing line between your personal life and the bakery itself. You just learn to do things without anything being said. It’s a customer service industry, and so you learn a lot of empathy.

It’s also just an extremely high-stress environment where minutes matter in so many different ways, so it teaches you grace under pressure. There’s no downtime. If you have a few minutes while the bread’s in the oven, you go look for something to do.

And then finally, I learned a sense of how to find fun in the challenges. There were lots of those, some involving mafia-type characters, some just involving classic 1980s-type of sitcom scenarios — we had at all.

How did you become interested in environmental law?

My whole universe growing up was the concrete jungle. We never had a vacation. Once or twice a year we would drive up the New Jersey Turnpike to look at bakeries in New York. I’d never been out in the wilderness.

My first time driving up to college [at Cornell University], I remember looking out the window and seeing all these trees and mountains, and that was completely eye-opening. I had no perception that these places actually existed. I became very passionate that I wanted to be an environmentalist. But I also wanted to protect communities like where I had grown up, which was a very industrial, immigrant neighborhood that had fallen on hard times. And I became focused on how we can protect the environment while also having a sense of protecting jobs and manufacturing and industrialization.

What should students know about the public and private sectors as they look for jobs?

I think the sense of public service is something everybody should experience. You will be surrounded by the most passionate people in whatever field you pursue. The public sector can really throw you into issues in ways that the private sector can’t early in a career. It’s less hierarchical, and you get very intense introduction to topics very quickly. That’s good for some people. It’s not great for everybody.

I think the world has moved to a place where the private sector can have more impact than the public sector when it comes to moving issues forward in areas related to energy, climate and sustainability. It just moves faster. It’s more accountable, and it sticks to strategic planning that lasts more than four years. And many times, the private sector can provide a better training ground for at least the first couple of years, and that’s invaluable.

What soft skills have you found to be particularly important in your work?

I think about artificial intelligence and how students are going to differentiate themselves, and I really believe the soft skills question becomes the differentiator. And I go back to this notion of empathy and being very service-oriented. I think the world is always looking for people who lift up a whole team versus the individual.

The other one is brevity in communications. Whether it’s an email, PowerPoint presentation, writing a blog, doing a podcast or public speaking, you only get a few seconds to connect with your audience, and you have to have empathy for the recipient of your message.

I’ve seen some of the most sophisticated companies in the world walk into a room with big government officials and share the same talking points that they probably shared in the last 10 meetings, and not understand that they’re going to be received differently based on the geography, based on the politics, based on the goals of the people in the room. You don’t have to change who you are, but your audience matters, and being empathetic towards how you communicate can be a real game changer.

Any other thoughtS you’d like to share with Nicholas School students?

I see so much optimism and very high energy in the students towards being solutions-focused. I’m excited that they are going to have these amazing careers at a time when big investments are being made to solve some of the planet’s biggest challenges.

This is a condensed and lightly edited version of a longer interview.