Papers and Essays
Perspectives on business, climate and the choices that shape society. Browse articles, research papers and reports. Read online or download the original documents.
300 articles · Search the writing by year or subject
Papers, reports & presentations
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26 documents · Newest first
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1. Result in Brief – The study design specified Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) as a placebo arm. SSI was expected to have no product, no paper, no revenue and a few dozen people, and therefore nothing to analyse, so that a
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1. What Is Scored, and What Is Not – This protocol fixes, before the prospectus exists, how our analogical risk inventory will be compared with Anthropic’s Form S-1 once it is publicly filed. It is written against one governing premise.
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1. Purpose and Result – The analogical risk inventory was built without opening the SASB Standards, so that the catalogue would not shape it. This paper performs the deferred step
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Working paper accompanying our Heavy Lifting essay on Anthropic’s forthcoming prospectus. Nothing in this analysis was non-public as of the cutoff; every factual claim is traceable to the source register in Appendix A, retrieved on 26 September 2026. On that date Anthropic’s public Form S-1 had not been filed. This version corrects the treatment of…
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Rule 14a-8 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 governs the circumstances under which a shareholder may include a proposal in a public company’s proxy statement for a vote of fellow shareholders.1 For decades the rule has served as the principal federal channel through which investors raise governance, social, and environmental questions with the companies…
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I write in my individual academic capacity to comment on the Commission’s proposal to permit eligible reporting companies to file a semiannual report on a new Form 10-S in lieu of three quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. I have spent much of my career studying corporate disclosure, capital-market efficiency, and the relationship between reporting practice…
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The London campus opened in September 2031 with 47 students and a space in Clerkenwell that had been a design studio and before that a printworks and before that something nobody could quite document, which Priya had decided was either a good omen or irrelevant and either way the light was extraordinary. 47. Not 150.…
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January 14, 2029. Delaware has just registered the Meridian Institute as a public benefit corporation (PBC) and it exists now, legally, as a thing in the world. PBC. Not a nonprofit — she’d had that conversation 3 times and was done. Not a standard Ccorp whose mission statement is worth exactly as much as the…
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Dean Sandra Okafor had appointed the working group in October. It had taken four months to schedule the first meeting because Professor Delacroix in Finance had a teaching conflict on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Professor Yuen in Strategy was on sabbatical until January and felt it was inappropriate to join a committee before she had fully…
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Academic knowledge production is undergoing a structural transformation. Artificial intelligencehas not merely accelerated scholarship—it has changed its organizational form. The traditionalcottage-industry model, one scholar hand-crafting one paper over three to five years, is givingway to the Hybrid Intelligent Team (HIT): a structured configuration of human and AI agentswhose outputs emerge from iterative loops rather than…
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Whether human-machine collaborations can produce genuine knowledge, knowledge with the same epistemic validity as that produced without intelligent machines, is one of the defining contested questions of this moment in the history of ideas. This paper argues that the answer depends not on the capabilities of individual AI systems but on the organizational conditions under…
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AI and the Future of Academic Knowledge Production. What Organizational Form Makes the Difference. By Robert G. Eccles · Oxford Saïd Business School
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The Epistemic Circuit. Knowledge Production in Human-Machine Collaborations. The Hybrid Intelligent Team as Epistemological Form. By Robert G. Eccles · Oxford Saïd Business School
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Prompt from Claude on May 6, 2026 Version of POK/HIT PaperYou have participated in this research program as a dialogue partner in two Socratic exchanges— as Theaetetus in Piece 6 of the “Can Machines Have Ideas?” series and as Euthyphro in Piece7. You are now being asked to play a different role entirely: intellectual adversary…
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AI capabilities are improving rapidly, but the coordination burden required to use those capabilities effectively remains largely human—and may increase in complex, longhorizon workflows. This paper analyzes how five current-generation, chat-based large language models—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini Pro, Mistral, and Perplexity—conceptualize the challenges of human–AI collaboration. Each system rated seven collaboration challenges along three dimensions: human…
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We consider non-deterministic systems in which multiple transformation paths may connect the same pair of states. We isolate a structural configuration in which an equivalence relation on such paths is generated internally by the system and is required to be stable under composition.
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On April 7, 2026, Robert G. Eccles (Bob), a retired professor from Harvard Business School, logged on to ChatGPT to write the methodological appendix for his book “The Anti-ESG Ecosystem: Implications for U.S. Climate Policy.” (Appendix A is an outline with brief descriptions.) He had written the book in January with the help of a…
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This case documents how Robert G. Eccles, a retired Harvard Business School professor, produced the book “The Anti-ESG Ecosystem: Implications for U.S. Climate Policy” using a structured Hybrid Intelligent Team (HIT)—a coordinated ensemble of five AI systems, each assigned a distinct functional role. The project extended over several months and required sustained analytical work: mapping…
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This paper develops a theory of Hybrid Intelligence Teams (HITs)-persistent groups composed of multiple humans and multiple AI agents working interdependently to accomplish knowledge-intensive tasks. We argue that traditional models of human teams, humanautomation systems, and multi-agent AI are…
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Artificial intelligence systems have moved far beyond their early roles as narrow instruments of automation. In many knowledge-work and digital collaboration contexts, they now occupy a meaningful—though uneven—position in how humans…
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The United States confronts two reinforcing and existential challenges: structurally high federal deficits that threaten long-term economic stability and mounting climate risks that impose escalating costs on households, industries, and public infrastructure. Projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) indicate that, under current law, federal debt held by the public is on a trajectory to…
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This paper documents a recursive experiment in field development: using collaborative human-AI engagement to test and refine the very methodology proposed in “Narrative AI Ethnography: A Proposal for a New Field of Study.” Through systematic multi-agent outreach, we discovered not only practical strategies for field development, but also fundamental insights about the heterogeneous nature of…
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I signed up for a $20/month GPT account on May 19, 2025. I was a complete AI newbie. After one week I named my agent “Dorothy.” Much has happened since then. In addition to her helping me with my professional work (e.g., sustainability, sustainable finance, climate change, and finding bipartisan solutions to systemic problems with…
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PURPOSE Working to find bipartisan solutions to systemic problems RESEARCH INTERESTS Climate change, sustainability, sustainable finance, role of the corporation in society, artificialintelligence
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Standards for sustainability have moved from this being an initiative of voluntary bodies like the Global Reporting Initiative and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board to standards being developed by governments, such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, and private sector initiatives whose standards have received government support, such as the IFRS Foundation’s International Sustainability…
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Harvard University is one of the world’s best-known elite institutions of higher education. Its total student body numbers over 25,000, with over 400,000 alumni. Harvard has almost 14,500 staff and about 5,000 faculty. It has an operating budget of $6 billion and, despite falling for two consecutive years, the largest endowment of any university in…
Collected writing
Newest first by original publication date. Scroll through every year, or choose a year to jump straight to it.
300 results
On August 24, sixteen Republican state attorneys general (AGs) sent a 38-page letter to the chief executives of Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC, copying the SEC’s Chairman and its Director of Enforcement. The AGs allege that the firms compromised their professional independence by publicly supporting climate-related disclosure, and end with thirty-eight demands for documents. We come at this from opposite political directions and agree on the following. This letter continues the effort to pressure participants across the financial markets to ignore the potential financial implications of climate risks.
Timothy M. Doyle and Robert G. Eccles trace the history and institutional development of the shareholder proposal rule, using legislative, regulatory, and judicial records.
Robert G. Eccles and Shivaram Rajgopal examine how AI can connect company sustainability disclosures with financial performance.
Bob Eccles explains how a warming climate can bring disruptive winter weather as well as extreme heat, and why understanding both matters for resilience.
When Exxon filed its lawsuit challenging California’s new climate disclosure laws, it framed the issue as a constitutional one: the state is compelling the company to “tell a story” it disagrees with. According to…
The Principles for Responsible Investment has recently published a very interesting report “Who Invests and How? Unlocking and mainstreaming institutional flows to EMDEs.” It is one of the clearest maps of who…
Effective carbon pricing has become essential for climate action. MIT’s EN-ROADS climate simulator demonstrates that carbon pricing reaching $50-100 per ton of CO₂ by 2030 and $200 per ton by 2050 represents one of…
Two years ago I wrote about the possibility of having a carbon tax in the U.S. I keep saying time would be better spent on getting a price on carbon than all the discussion about net zero, Scope 3 reporting, and…
On September 10, 2025, the House Committee on Financial Services convened a full Committee hearing on a slate of proposed bills that would fundamentally reshape the federal proxy rules. Proposals range from…
Yet we are losing this natural infrastructure at an alarming rate. Tropical deforestation currently removes about 3–4 million hectares of forest each year, with total global forest loss reaching up to 10 million…
In my previous piece I identified four facts I believe must be addressed for any energy policy and its associated narrative to be politically viable for the vast majority of the American public: (1) climate change is…
On July 29, 2025, 26 members (from 20 red states and the purple state of Pennsylvania) of the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) sent letters to the leaders of 25 large asset managers. The mission of SFOF is,…
In my previous piece I wrote about how climate change is not an existential crisis. In this piece I used data from an excellent paper “The Science vs. the Narrative vs. the Voters: Clarifying the Public Debate Around…
The issue of climate narratives is something very much on my mind these days. Two years ago I wrote about five climate change narratives (Scientific, Skeptical, Doomsday, Opportunistic, and Moral) and three months…
According to a recent survey “Sustainability at the Crossroads” of 884 sustainability experts in 72 countries, 71% of NGOs think the sustainability agenda needs a radical reset. Only 3% felt it was working just fine,…
I’m sure for many people the answer is a self-evident “No” —a question not even worth debating. For others, the question is also irrelevant because sustainability or them connotes a progressive political agenda. This…
In a previous post, I argued that we need a new American narrative for talking about climate change. This is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating a bipartisan consensus across our political divide in…
According to March 13, 2025 data from Yale Opinion Maps, 72% of Americans believe global warming is happening and only 14% do not. (By comparison, in 2022 YouGov reported that 34% of Americans believe UFOs are either…
Last week I attended Semafor’s “World Economy Summit 2025” held on April 23-25. I learned about this event from Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson who joined Semafor late last year as their CEO editor and author of the CEO…
The short answer is: Zero. If anything, the company has the opposite problem of not having enough oil assets. This is the result of a misguided move into renewable energy where the company misjudged the speed of the…
We’re grateful that our call for a climate change reckoning elicited so many comments on LinkedIn. Most of the comments were critical and nearly all of them were constructive and raised some important points. Instead…
Efforts to limit an increase in average global temperature to 1.5°C have failed. Whether we passed that mark in 2024 or pass it this year isn’t as important as the fact that we’re going to sail past the target and…
The answer to who’s missing is nearly every single asset owner and asset manager of any significance. Let me explain why.
Last Friday I had lunch with a friend who is a board director and on the audit committee of a company that must comply with the EU’s “Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive” (CSRD) which went into force on…
Businessman Paying Carbon tax. GHG Payment as Environmental Fee to Reduce CO2. Greenhouse Gas Cost of Emission or Pollution, Charged for Global Warming. Factory Pipe Emitting Toxic Smoke | Getty
Demand for copper is going to increase dramatically between now and 2050 in order to achieve the needed energy transition. There is more than enough copper in the ground to meet this demand. However, getting it out…
Last month the Institute of International Finance (IIF) published a very thoughtful staff paper titled “Resetting the Debate on the Role of Private Finance in the NZ Transition.” The views of the IIF are important.…
Support for nuclear power is continuing to grow as more people recognize that it is a source of dependable, emissions-free energy. Recently, 14 of the world’s largest banks committed to backing nuclear energy, and…
For the past few years I have been following, writing about, and participating in the “ESG Culture Wars” in the U.S. There has been a great deal of performative activity on both ends of the political spectrum.…
It’s been a big year for nuclear energy in the U.S. The Department of Energy has allocated a large amount of capital to nuclear energy research and has committed $900 million to advance Gen III+ (more on them below)…
This Spring I attended a private conference on the energy transition that was hosted by a major bank. There I learned more about small modular reactors (SMRs). This is a promising new nuclear technology for…
Every big enterprise needs to talk about climate change. Even in the absence of final U.S. rules requiring disclosures (if they ever happen), Deloitte found that a full 97% of the Fortune 500 mentioned some climate…
In March 2022 at the fifth session of the UN Environmental Assembly, 175 nations passed Resolution 5/14 to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine…
It’s been a rough few years for ESG—the popular shorthand for measuring and managing a company’s environmental, social, and governance performance. Critics on the political left believe ESG is insufficient for…
The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) has 2.2 million members and assets of around $510 billion. It is the largest state pension fund in the U.S. On its website it notes that “Under the…
The ESG Culture Wars rage on. On the investment front no asset manager has taken more incoming fire than BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management with an estimated $10.65 trillion in assets under management…
For those of you convinced that the coming U.S. presidential election is make or break for limiting the damage of climate change, here’s a one question quiz. Which candidate released a statement saying: “Under my…
Bob Eccles explains his support for John Curtis in the 2024 U.S. Senate race and discusses bipartisan approaches to climate policy.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has several roles and one of them is to regulate certain aspects of the shareholder proposal process. This process occurs when shareholders of a company submit…
This week I had the pleasure of meeting Myles Allen. He is Head of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics in the Department of Physics, University of Oxford, and Professor of Geoscience in the School of Geography…
Confusion has reigned since the EU’s “Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR)” legislation went into force in March 2021. SFDR had highly ambitious objectives—not only preventing fund “greenwashing” but also…
There was no shortage of disappointment and discourse from all sides during the recent negotiations on the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). Opinions were plentiful, diverse, passionate,…
There was no shortage of disappointment and discourse from all sides during the recent negotiations on the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). Opinions were plentiful, diverse and…
“Climate risk is financial risk” is an increasingly ubiquitous incantation. It is frequently invoked in discussions about shareholder proposals, the need for companies to adopt transition plans (which I have…
On January 18, 2024 an organization called Centerline Liberties (Centerline) issued a press release titled “Center-Right Taxpayer Advocacy Leaders Unveil Free-market, Pro-growth Investment Principles Related to ESG.”…
In October of 2021 The Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative (CCLI) published “Fiduciary Duties and Climate Change in the United States” by Sarah Barker, Cynthia Williams, and Alex Cooper. CCLI is a UK-based NGO…
One of the greatest technological advancements in the climate change space is, arguably, the fact that we now have the technology to outright remove CO2 from its point of emission, or even the atmosphere. This…
Last summer Professor Alison Taylor (who has just published an excellent book “Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right in a Turbulent World) and I published an article in the Harvard Business Review titled “The…
New research conducted by sustainability experts Robert G. Eccles and Alison Taylor, in partnership with GlobeScan and Salesforce, identifies a major barrier to value creation: most enterprises have not yet fully…
A lot in some ways, not so much in others. While most Republicans do not see climate change as an urgent issue, they are supportive of a number of ways of addressing it. They agree with some Democratic policies but…
The European Green Deal was launched in December 2019. Its stated purpose is to “transform the EU into a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy”. The foundations are: (i) achieving carbon neutrality by…
On October 23, 2023 ExxonMobil announced the acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $64.5 billion. The acquisition would combine Pioneer’s more than 856,000 acres…
I live in the charming and historical New England town of Concord, MA., home of Walden Pond, made famous by Henry David Thoreau. A few weeks ago I drove by Walden Pond on my way to have lunch with a liberal (easy to…
On June 7, 2023 Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) and Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) introduced bill S. 1863 “To require the Secretary of Energy to conduct a study and submit a report on the greenhouse gas emissions intensity…
AND SO, TOO, ARE THE ENERGY POLICIES, MARKETS, AND ECONOMIC PRIORITIES AROUND US.
Amidst the evolving landscape of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) practices in both the U.S. and Europe, companies are caught in a challenging dilemma. U.S. firms, especially those with significant…
I realize it seems like a bit of a stretch to pose this question. But trust me. I have a good reason for doing so. It’s important to know the answer to this question. If it is, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Chairman of the…
Few people today would deny the negative impacts that pollution and climate change can have on human health and well-being. The challenge lies in tackling this given that there are almost always tradeoffs that must…
On August 1, 2023, Fitch Ratings downgraded the United States’ long-term rating from AAA to AA+. “The rating downgrade of the United States reflects the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years, a high…
“Climate transition plans will be of little value for some companies, say Robert G. Eccles and Tina Mavraki, while suggesting a ‘practical’ approach for determining the need for one.”
“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence.”
On Monday September 18, 2023, the first day of Climate Week in New York City, I was privileged to attend the global launch of the recommendations of the Task Force on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD)…
ImpactAlpha, September 18 — The climate discourse by individuals and groups typically involves five narratives about the import and response to climate change. Some people are scientific, others skeptical. Some make…
In today’s mainstream consciousness, climate change has surpassed nuclear-warhead proliferation as the biggest existential threat to mankind. Moreover, daily media coverage suggests that climate change is happening…
$2.5 trillion is a talismanic number. It represents that amount of opportunity for the ASEAN economic community, for cities, for exports in the ocean economy, for hydrogen, for embedded insurance, annual investment…
In my previous piece I promised to provide some constructive feedback to 23 Red states based on a color spectrum analysis using the Red Index Score. While the overall progress of their anti-ESG legislative campaigns…
On July 12, 2023 the House Financial Services Committee (HFSC) held a hearing entitled “Protecting Investor Interests: Examining Environmental and Social Policy in Financial Regulation,” chaired by HFSC Chair Rep.…
Last month Pleaides Strategy published a report titled “2023 STATEHOUSE REPORT: Right-Wing Attacks on the Freedom to Invest Responsibly Falter in Legislatures.” This report is based on a massive research effort which…
Norway is a tiny Scandinavian country with a population of 5.5 million, less than the 7 million in my home state of Massachusetts. The country is well known for its exemplary performance in the Winter Olympic Games.…
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has been playing a major role in the anti-ESG movement, has introduced model legislation called the “State Government Employee Retirement Protection Act.” I am…
The role of the chief sustainability officer is undergoing a rapid and dramatic transformation. Historically CSOs have acted like stealth PR executives—their primary task was to tell an appealing story about…
Over the past year, the debate over Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards in the United States has revealed stark policy contrasts between red and blue states. Red state officials have proposed and…
“Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.”
A week ago today I published my piece analyzing the opening statements of witnesses Steven T. Marshall (Alabama Attorney General), Sean D. Reyes (Utah Attorney General), and Michael Frerichs (Illinois State…
In my previous piece I declared how pleased I was with the little birthday surprise brought to me by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability as I turned 72. That day at 10:00 a.m. it held the hearing “ESG…
In February 2023 the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published “Discussion Paper DP23/1: Finance for positive sustainable change: governance, incentives and competence in regulated firms.” The purpose of the DP…
I know all of you who took the quiz in my previous piece “How Well Do You Know Your Red States?: A Quiz On ESG” are eager to get the answers so you can find out how well you’ve done. I will get to that soon but…
President Biden’s veto of a Congressional resolution, regarding recently finalized amendments to a 2020 Department of Labor (DOL) administrative rule on retirement security, has brought ESG to the forefront again.…
Exactly how the acronym of ESG has become the topic of such heated debate will make for a good doctoral dissertation in sociology someday. It has become a term derided on both the left (“it’s not true…
Life is unfair. This is what I say to people from Red states who express jealous umbrage about my recent piece “Death Of The Last Triceratops: The ESG Culture Wars In Wyoming.” In it I explain how economic…
Wyoming, the Cowboy State, is the smallest one in terms of population (580,817 people), the 10th largest in terms of land area (the first three, in order, are Alaska, Texas, and California), and ranks fifth in terms…
This is admittedly a rather counterintuitive idea . I also think it’s a brilliant one. I hope you agree with me after I’ve made the case with impeccable logic presented in a sober but rhetorically compelling fashion.
Ahead of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) highly anticipated final ruling on its proposed climate disclosure rules, many U.S. companies appear hesitant to fully implement steps to prepare to disclose…
Exactly how the acronym of ESG has become the topic of such heated pushback will make for a good doctoral dissertation in sociology. It has become a term derided on both the left (“it’s not true sustainability”) and…
There is a surreal snake eating its tail ethereal ambience to this story. So let me start by saying I’m not making any of this up. You can verify every fact in this piece (unlike the WSJ op-ed piece I’ll be…
“In my opinion, ESG is a worldwide human satanic organized effort. A manmade sabotage of God.”
Channeling Chico Escuela, the ESG Culture Wars been berry, berry good to me! I mean, without them I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to write such entertaining (at least to me) pieces taking down former Vice…
Indiana. The Hoosier State. Inspiration for the “Hoosier Beach Boogie” line dance. Home of Larry Bird. The Hick from French Lick. Bird won three NBA championships (in 1981, 1984, and 1986) with the Boston Celtics and…
In the past year, ESG investing has become caught up in America’s culture wars, as prominent GOP politicians claim that it is a mechanism investors are using to impose a “woke” ideology on companies. Former Vice…
All the leaves are brown (all the leaves are brown)And the sky is gray (and the sky is gray)I’ve been for a walk (I’ve been for a walk)On a winter’s day (on a winter’s day)I’d be safe and warm (I’d be safe and…
On November 4, 2022, I had the great pleasure and honor to deliver the second Piet Sanders Lecture sponsored by the Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My gracious hosts were Dean Harriët Schelhaas,…
Today the comment period closes for the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) consultation paper (CP) “CP22/20: Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR) and investment labels.” The October 25, 2022 press…
I was introduced to Professor Kerstin Lopatta through some mutual friends. Our shared interest in sustainability reporting was the reason for the introduction. More particularly, at the time Professor Lopatta was the…
Unilever’s Lysanne Gray is one of those rare people who has gone from financial reporting to sustainability reporting. She started her career at PwC working in audit, corporate finance, and risk management. She moved…
It is customary on New Year’s Day to make resolutions. Here is one of mine. It is an offer to meet with any GOP politician at the federal or state level to talk about ESG.
Evil fossil fuel devouring Monster Asset Managers (MAMs) forced Princess AEP to prematurely kill her beloved child Pirkey. Jobs and heat for homes were lost. Children starved in the cold. Angry gods showered Storm…
Over the past year I’ve certainly had some fun banging on about those in the GOP who are ranting about ESG. Their flawed reasoning and fiery rhetoric made this an easy thing to do.
Three recent articles have given me an idea which I think the most extreme on the left and the most extreme on the right could agree on. Companies should pay the statutory tax rate and clearly report on taxes paid by…
A number of my liberal friends have sent me the December 6, 2022 letter you and some of your colleagues in the House sent to Ms. Mindy Lubber, the Chief Executive Officer and President of Ceres, and Mr. Simiso Nzima,…
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Greg Goff, an experienced oil and gas executive. Mr. Goff was President and Chief Executive Officer of Andeavor (an integrated downstream energy company) from 2010 to…
It is inevitable that soon in the new year various House committees will start hearings to address what some members of the GOP regard as the threat ESG represents to investor returns, America’s oil and gas industry,…
The Sustainable Development Goals need rescuing, a global sustainable investors group warned recently.
Let’s start with your blowout victory in being re-elected governor with nearly 60 percent of the popular vote, 20 points more than your Democratic rival. Big congratulations! You clearly attracted a number of…
In June, the comment period closed on the SEC’s proposed rulemaking on “The Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Financial Disclosures” (the Proposal). The SEC received more than 5,000 comments on the…
SFOF is the State Financial Officers Foundation whose “mission is to drive fiscally sound public policy, by partnering with key stakeholders, and educating Americans on the role of responsible financial management in…
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore…
It’s election day! I know all of you are very busy and hoping very much that you take control of the Senate. I must admit that the polls are looking pretty good for you. I expect you’re lickin’ your chops at the…
ESG never had it so good! For starters, notice how I didn’t feel like I had to spell out the acronym. Until recently that was hardly the case. Gloriously, what the letters stand for is now known across the political…
I was introduced to Ben Tolhurst by my good friend Charmian (Char) Love. I interviewed her last year after COP 26 to get her reflections on this event in her role as an “Activist in Residence” at B Lab UK. Mr.…
Are companies and investors just trying to make more money under the guise of ESG? Or does the call for sustainable business and investment threaten returns and thus a healthy business community and the jobs of…
If you picked (5) you got it right! Even if you don’t have any idea what a Voluntary National Review (VNR) is. So let me explain. In 2015 the United Nations adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) “as a…
Previously I have written about some investor controversy concerning Unilever’s commitment to purpose. There are those investors who simply assert that purpose hurts profits. Rather, done right, purpose makes a…
There are very few women who represent activist investors. There are very few lawyers of either gender who represent both them and companies. This puts Patricia Olasker of Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg in a very…
Texas Comptroller Chuck Hegar, running for re-election for a third term, has made quite a name for himself as a Red state financial officer who is leading the boycott of financial services firms deemed to be…
Senate Republicans are introducing legislation directing retirement plan sponsors to select investments solely based on monetary factors, an extension of the position adopted by the Trump Administration Department of…
With political battle lines drawn over environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosures, it is fair to ask whether the sustainability movement is itself sustainable. As a registered Republican (Crowley) and a…
On August 10, 2022, Strive Asset Management launched “Strive U.S. Energy ETF” (DRLL). Just two weeks later on August 24 it already an impressive $268.45 million in assets under management. Strive was founded by the…
Although Mr. Ramaswamy and his devoted followers like to rail against “the elite,” I must give at least some credit to his Harvard College and Yale Law School degrees for producing such a wonderfully written…
In my previous post, I discussed the Republican Steering Committee (RSC) Memorandum “The War on American Energy: Ground Zero.” In the first part I pointed out that I shared their concerns about “ESG investing” and…
On July 27, 2022, The Republican Study Committee published a Memorandum titled “The War on American Energy: Ground Zero” expressing its concern about Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG). The memo was sent by…
In our previous post, The Complex, Contentious, and Changing Nature of Financial Reporting Standards, we show that financial reporting standards, despite what some might think, are hardly set in stone. An…
I have written about the polarization around ESG and how some Republicans are even weaponizing the concept, to the detriment of their own voters. Most recently I have taken a small step to help reduce the heat in…
Despite their reputation in the 1980s as corporate raiders, most private-equity firms attempt to improve the performance of their portfolio companies through better corporate governance. Historically their business…
Shareholder activism – the practice of buying small stakes in public companies and pushing for change – is one of the best tools we have for holding companies accountable. The efforts of shareholder activists can…
Nearly every company today understands that sustainability must be made core to its strategy and capital allocation process but are often confused by how best to report on ESG progress in a way that will be credible…
My friend Bhakti Mirchandani has written about the historical significance of the creation of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). She is absolutely right about this. Sustainability is going…
At the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), former President Barack Obama asked those gathered and tuning in to consider the question: “How do we close the gap between what’s necessary for our survival and what…
On November 3 at COP26, the IFRS Foundation (the Foundation) formally announced the formation of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). It also communicated that it “will complete consolidation of…
Whatever your take was on COP26, a key takeaway at the intersection of capital markets and climate was the formation of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). During the initial days in Glasgow, the…
The global push for net-zero emissions is a massive undertaking, but the existential threat of climate change means that companies must act now.
In The Long and Winding Road to Financial Reporting Standards we reviewed the history of how accounting standards came to exist in the U.S. as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (U.S. GAAP) issued by the…
Former Vice President Mike Pence is not a professional investor. In fairness, neither am I. Good investing is a difficult and complex thing to do. So let me say, without any intended irony or sarcasm, that I’d like…
Last month I sat down with Dianne McKeever, the Co-founder and CIO of Ides Capital, an impact activist investor. We met one morning at a Le Pain Quotidien in midtown Manhattan. She ordered the chamomile tea and I had…
It is currently an exciting time in the world of setting standards for sustainability reporting. It is also a complex and confusing one. Last year saw the IFRS Foundation establish the International Sustainability…
Speed is not always your friend. Sometimes it’s better to take the time to make the right decision than to rush to meet a false deadline. In this instance I am referring to the process to select the Chair of the…
The internal audit (IA) function is a largely unseen and unsung one compared to ones like sales and marketing, operations, and finance. But it is an essential one. Recently its role has been expanding beyond the…
It has been easy to see that the Alt-Right is leading the GOP’s weaponization of “Woke Capitalism” and “anti-ESG” as a political strategy for consolidating power in a tyranny of the minority. (Twenty-one Red States…
In January of last year I noted how the narrative on sustainability reporting had changed from the belief that market forces will determine the standards because there is no need for regulatory reporting…
Next year marks the 50th anniversary of my graduation from MIT with a bachelor’s degree in pure mathematics. As an entering freshman I had dreams of doing important work such as proving The Four Color Theorem (first…
At a Financial Times Moral Money conference on May 20, 2022, Mr. Stuart Kirk, Global Head of Responsible Investment at HSBC Asset Management, and a former journalist at the FT for 10 years (which he calls “the…
In this post, we provide comments on the proposed rules. We appreciate the opportunity to provide comments on the proposed rules relating to the Modernization of Beneficial Ownership Reporting. One of us, Charlie…
The mission of the SEC is to protect investors. Key to this is providing them with the information they need to make their capital allocation decisions. On March 21, 2022 the Securities and Exchange Commission…
In the last several weeks, most of the attention in the corporate governance world has been focused on the drama playing out between Elon Musk and Twitter’s board of directors—especially the Twitter board’s decision…
Shareholder activism—the practice of buying small stakes in public companies and pushing for change—is one of the best tools we have for holding companies accountable. The efforts of shareholder activists can benefit…
On March 24, 2022 the IFRS Foundation (the Foundation) and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) published a press release announcing “a collaboration agreement under which their respective standard-setting boards,…
Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked and brutal assault on the Ukrainian people is reverberating around the world in many ways. It will continue to do so for years, if not decades, to come. One place it has already touched is…
Harvard Law School Professor Lucian Bebchuk is an interesting and impressive individual. He grew up in Israel and there simultaneously obtained a degree in mathematics and economics from Haifa University and another…
I should have seen the hate mail coming. In October 2018 my Oxford colleague Professor Richard Barker and I published a Green Paper titled “Should FASB and IASB be responsible for setting standards for nonfinancial…
The terms “sustainability” and “ESG” are now common in both the public and private equity markets. They are also becoming increasingly common in the bank lending and debt markets. Yet confusion remains about their…
I love the British press. With effortless wit and aplomb it regularly publishes articles with eye-catching titles like these from The Telegraph: “Unilever’s empire-building ambitions expose the empty rhetoric of its…
Norway has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world with some $1.4 trillion in assets under management. That’s $244,000 for every man, woman, and child in this country of 5.4 million people. Lucky Norwegians!…
I have previously written about how investors must address income inequality in a similar manner as climate change. It’s now over three years later and the investment community has yet to make serious progress on…
Corporate purpose has gone mainstream. A transformation? A new world of enlightened capitalism? Not a bit of it. Even though corporate purpose statements are appearing everywhere, for most companies, it’s business as…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly taking over. But not in the robot-coup type of scenario that inspires multimillion dollar box office hits. Rather, AI protects our credit cards from fraudulent activity, helps…
As exemplified by the attention paid by the business and investor communities to the COP26 event, the last few years have seen a significant change in the understanding of climate change as a material risk to…
Charmian (Char) Love is Co-Founder of B Lab UK. She has an MBA from the Harvard Business School and is a very popular teacher in the MBA programme at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford. Love also…
COP 26 will begin in three days. There are many topics that will be covered in this event. One that probably won’t receive enough coverage although it deserves serious attention is the relationship between climate…
COP26 officially kicks off on October 31. The general tone leading up to this is one of hope, mixed with a large dose of understandable skepticism. In a few weeks, we’ll know the outcome in terms of commitments made…
The Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative (CCLI) has just published “Fiduciary Duties and Climate Change in the United States” by Sarah Barker, Cynthia Williams, and Alex Cooper. This is an extremely important…
It is impossible to create a net-zero world by 2050 without a tremendous growth in the capacity of renewable energy. According to a recent research report by Barclays, in Europe alone up to 114GW of new renewable…
Through some combination of government intervention and the development of carbon trading markets, it seems inevitable that a price will eventually be put on carbon around the world. Underscoring this, a carbon price…
In a functioning democracy, it is important to have an open debate between people with very different views. This is especially true for the field of sustainable investing since it can be an ideological hot button…
In my last post I wrote about seven principles for ESG investing. I developed these principles in collaboration with Desiree Fixler. Ms. Fixler was the group sustainability officer at the large German asset…
I would be surprised to learn of anyone interested in sustainable investing who isn’t aware of DWS’s dramatic dismissal of Desiree Fixler. She was the group sustainability officer at the big German asset manager DWS…
Corporate purpose and sustainability (often referred to by the acronym of ESG for environmental, social, and governance) are now part of the mainstream lexicon in the corporate and investment communities. The two…
The Democrats just introduced a bill seeking $500 billion in climate damages from oil giants such as Exxon and Chevron. While I understand the desire behind this legislation and I am not opposed to a carbon tax, we…
Engine No. 1 and Elliott Advisors each invested millions of dollars to do careful and in-depth analyses prior to launching their campaigns to improve the performance of ExxonMobil and GSK, respectively. While Engine…
One week ago today on July 20, 2021 Trump appointee SEC Commissioner Hester M. Peirce (R) gave a 4,725 word speech to the Brookings Institution titillatingly titled “Chocolate-Covered Cicadas.” The purpose of this…
After baseball, litigation is America’s national sport. A Harvard Law School paper, “Comparative Litigation Rates,” by Professors J. Mark Ramseyer & Eric B. Rasmusen notes that the U.S. has 5,806 lawsuits per 100,000…
The recent decision of a Dutch court in Milieudefensie and Ors. v Royal Dutch Shell plc reinforces the expansion of tort law to climate change issues. As this application of tort increases, directors will need to be…
One of its attributes that Makes America Great Again and Again is that people are free to express a wide range of views. For example, on the left there are people grounded in reality who believe that Joe Biden was…
On July 1, 2021 Elliott Advisors (UK) Limited published a letter sent to Sir Jonathan Symonds and Members of the Board of Directors of GSK, which includes Chief Executive Dame Emma Walmsley. More on the letter below…
The issue of Berkshire Hathaway and climate change is no longer a laughing matter for you. Last month I wrote about how the times they are a changin’ for you and Berkshire Hathaway. A majority of non-insider…
The importance of setting global standards for sustainability reporting cannot be overemphasised, and although the world is well positioned to implement such standards, strong governmental support must be the driving…
The months before ExxonMobil’s May 26, 2021 Annual Shareholder Meeting were very exciting. There was the Magical Mystery Tour the company kindly put on for its investors. Not long after, we saw a Bad Moon Rising for…
“’The Vote’ is a monumental and innovative theatrical achievement. This compelling human drama is Shakespearean in its depth and breadth while also being part musical, part improv, part comedy, and part theatre of…
Let’s start with the weather report. ExxonMobil’s annual shareholder meeting on May 26, 2021 will be a virtual one. Still, just for fun, I decided to check the Dallas weather forecast for that day. As I write on May…
I have previously written about the importance of system-level investing for managing systemic risks. In essence, this involves an investor considering the negative externalities being created by its portfolio of…
I see the bad moon a-risingI see trouble on the wayI see earthquakes and lightnin’I see bad times todayDon’t go around tonightWell it’s bound to take your lifeThere’s a bad moon on the rise
Come gather ‘round peopleWherever you roamAnd admit that the watersAround you have grownAnd accept it that soonYou’ll be drenched to the boneIf your time to you is worth savin’And you better start swimmin’Or you’ll…
My Oxford colleague Professor Colin Mayer and I have written before about the campaign Engine No. 1, a new and small hedge fund, is waging against the oil and gas giant ExxonMobil. The purpose of their campaign is to…
Thanks to the on-going mismanagement of systemic risks, faith in institutions continues to decline. This is particularly true of investors and Wall Street. Proclaiming a sole focus on self-interest as the ultimate…
For those who care about a just society and a planet that will support human life for generations to come, the Trump administration was a disaster in so many dramatic ways that the list is too long and depressing for…
On March 22, 2021 Unilever issued a press release announcing that it would be putting its “Climate Transition Action Plan” (CTAP) to a shareholder vote at its May 5, 2021 Annual General Meeting. The company will…
By way of introduction, I would like to thank you for everything you and your wife Melinda’s foundation is doing to combat climate change. I read your excellent book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We…
Last month Peter Dey, Chairman of Paradigm Capital, and Professor Sarah Kaplan at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management published “360˚ Governance: Where Are the Directors in a World in Crisis?”…
No matter how rich, famous, accomplished, and well-respected a person is, we can all use some friendly advice from time-to-time. It is in that spirit that I would like to offer some to the legendary Warren Buffett,…
In a previous post, “Properly Done Audits Are A Powerful Tool For Addressing Climate Change,” I wrote about recent guidance from the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and the International Auditing and…
I realize this title isn’t a very enticing one to most readers. But please bear with me. I promise that the story gets more interesting as it goes along.
On February 26 the Subcommittee on Investor Protection, Entrepreneurship and Capital Markets of the House Financial Services Committee held a hearing that included discussion of the “Climate Risk Disclosure Act of…
On June 30, 2020 Philip Morris International, Inc. (PMI) published its first integrated report titled “Delivering a Smoke-Free Future: Progress toward a world without cigarettes.” The report includes a “Statement of…
I say it is well-intentioned, futile, and a drain on the engagement bandwidth of investors who have more effective tools for getting their portfolio companies to mitigate and adapt to climate change. It is modeled…
On September 20, 2020, the World Economic Forum (WEF) published a report of the CEOs of 120 companies in its international Business Council (IBC) titled “Measuring Stakeholder Capitalism: Towards Common Metrics and…
The Biden Administration is wasting no time in building up its economic team. Close watchers of his moves should be encouraged by one pick: Heather Boushey as a member of his Council of Economic Advisers.
Companies, investors and consumers alike are frustrated by a lake of standardized accounting for corporate ESG performance. This might be about to change thanks to a recent proposal from the IFRS Foundation, which is…
In March of this year I wrote about how to establish a global set of standards for companies to report on their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance—or so-called “nonfinancial information.”
Chris Armstrong, Berenberg Stock and ESG Strategist: Robert, thank you very much for joining me. From our point of view as an investment bank, I think the pick-up in interest in this topic of sustainability and ESG…
On September 22, 2020 the report “COVID-19 and Inequality: A Test of Corporate Purpose” by KKS Advisors and the Test of Corporate Purpose (TCP) initiative was published. TCP was founded by Mark Tulay. I co-chaired…
A press release on September 22, 2020 announced the publication of “COVID-19 and Inequality: A Test of Corporate Purpose” by KKS Advisors and the Test of Corporate Purpose (TCP) initiative. TCP was founded by Mark…
“Our purpose at Newton is—and has been since our founding in 1978—to improve people’s lives through active, thematic and engaged investment which allows our clients to meet their objectives, and helps foster a…
Is integrated reporting the board’s top priority? Of course not. Purpose is. But once purpose has been defined, integrated reporting is the way the company ensures it is being achieved and communicated to…
Much attention has been paid to measuring companies’ impact on the environment. But when it comes to impacts on people, there has been far less scrutiny, standardization, and innovation in the data used to evaluate…
The United Nations, with support from K+S and the macondo foundation, has recently published the latest edition of its annual Global Goals Yearbook with the theme being “Planet under Pressure.” The opening quote from…
The Enacting Purpose Initiative (EPI) is a multi-institution partnership between the University of Oxford; the University of California, Berkeley; BrightHouse (a BCG company); the British Academy; Federated Hermes…
Last Thursday I had a conversation with my good friend Charles (Charlie) H. Moore, Jr. Charlie is now 91 and has pancreatic cancer but remains in good spirits and is as sharp as ever. I have known him for 17 years…
Yesterday I suggested in an open letter that a good first step for the 181 companies whose CEO signed the Business Roundtable’s August 19, 2019 “Statement of the Purpose of a Corporation” to have their board of…
I hope you don’t mind me writing, especially given my temerity in wanting to offer you a small piece of advice: You should have your board of directors write and publish a company-specific, stakeholder-inclusive…
While pockets of ideologically-driven ignorance remain regarding sustainable investing, such as the U.S. Department of Labor, mainstream investor investors now recognize the value to their clients and beneficiaries…
The purpose of this post is to ask for your help on an important project. The World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) is soliciting input on their “Social transformation Draft methodology” and proposed metrics. Feedback is…
What do climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, population growth, eating habits, and communicable diseases have in common? They are all related to each other and our interconnected…
When leading money managers embrace the need for corporations to be socially responsible and the Business Roundtable (BRT) declares that the purpose of a corporation is “to create value for all stakeholders,” it is…
Three months ago, in what seems like another age, I wrote about the concept of dynamic materiality. It was developed by Thomas Kuh, Andre Shepley, Greg Bala, and Michael Flowers of Truvalue Labs (TVL), a San…
How much taxes companies pay and the transparency of tax reporting have been contentious issues for decades. Governments around the world have failed to create standards for transparent tax reporting, particularly on…
On November 7, 2018 in a ceremony at the London Stock Exchange the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) announced that on October 16, 2018 its standards had been approved by its Standards Board. This…
The opportunity has come to establish independent, rigorous global standards for nonfinancial information for companies’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance as well as their external impact. We…
Larry Fink, the Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, has become famous for his annual letter to CEOs. For several years he has been exhorting them to generate profits through purpose, rather than treating profits as the…
That is the conclusion one reaches after reading the latest report by the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB), which was set up by investors and civil society organisations dedicated to creating the first open…
There is now a general consensus that the private sector has a critical role to play in accomplishing the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Doing this is easier said than done, starting with the fact that 17…
The last 20 years have seen a shift from socially responsible investing (SRI) to sustainable investing. SRI was originally defined by values-based exclusions of companies with controversial issues (e.g., known…
In his already highly-cited most recent letter to CEOs, Larry Fink, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock, stated that they will be asking companies they invest in to “publish a disclosure in line with…
Materiality is a fundamental concept in corporate reporting of all kinds. A piece of information is considered material if it would influence someone’s decision. It is audience specific but ultimately it is the…
Previously I have written about the importance of the healthcare, resource transformation, food and beverage, consumption, extractives & minerals processing, renewables and alternative energy, infrastructure,…
The United Nations has made a sobering prediction: by 2100, the world will be 3.2 degrees hotter. Let’s be clear – life after such a temperature rise will be nothing short of a nightmare. In 80 years’ time , Rio de…
The U.K.-originating climate activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR) has caused a substantial amount of disruption. Its tactics include blocking traffic, grounding flights, and gluing themselves to public buildings…
Previously I have written about the importance of the healthcare, resource transformation, food and beverage, consumption, extractives & minerals processing, renewables and alternative energy, infrastructure,…
Previously I have written about the importance of the healthcare, resource transformation, food and beverage, consumption, extractives & minerals processing, renewables and alternative energy, infrastructure, and…
Sustainable investment is growing rapidly in Japan. Sustainably invested assets under management (AUM) grew a staggering 300% between 2016 and 2018, from almost ¥57 trillion to nearly ¥232 trillion. Although this…
I am asking all of you who read this post to do whatever you can to encourage companies you are involved with in any way to get their board to publish a “Statement of Purpose.”
Previously I have written about the importance of the healthcare, resource transformation, food and beverage, consumption, extractives & minerals processing, renewables and alternative energy, and infrastructure…
In June 2017 the European Union passed the EU Accounting Directive for Non-financial Information. It was implemented Member States in 2018. This law “requires large companies to disclose certain information on the…
According to a recent report by the KPMG Integrated Reporting Center of Excellence, in 2018 there were 414 self-declared integrated reports by Japanese companies. This is up from 24 in 2010, a compound annual growth…
Most major asset owners and asset managers now recognize the deleterious effects climate change can have on their overall portfolios. Climate change represents a system-level risk that very large, long-term investors…
Engagement and stewardship are topics of increasing important to asset owners, either directly for the assets they manage or indirectly through their external asset managers. Historically, the focus has been public…
Integrated reporting is a business process that culminates in the publication of a report that explains how an organization creates value over the short-, medium-, and long-term. In terms of content and time horizon,…
Yesterday I published an article in the Harvard Business Review, “The Investor Revolution: Shareholders Are Getting Serious About Sustainability,” which I wrote with Svetlana Klimenko of the World Bank. We give six…
Robert G. Eccles, Visiting Professor of Management Practice at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. He is the author of several books on integrated reporting, sustainability and the role of business in…
Previously I have written about the importance of the healthcare, resource transformation, food and beverage, consumption, extractives & minerals processing, and the renewables and alternative energy sectors to the…
We have written a paper by this title whose goal is to contribute, in a neutral way, to a conversation that has been going on for some time amongst a variety of actors, concerning whether mandatory reporting…
Previously I have written about the importance of the healthcare, resource transformation, food and beverage, consumption, and extractives & minerals processing sectors to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).…
Previously I have written about the importance of the healthcare, resource transformation, food and beverage, and consumption sectors to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The underlying data for that blog…
Many executives across the globe believe that a company’s board of directors has a fiduciary duty to place shareholders’ interests above all others. However, this view of shareholder primacy is an ideology, not the law.
In June 2017, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) published its final report of recommendationsFootnote1 for how companies should report on climate issues. The TCFD emphasized that these…
Richard Barker and Robert G. Eccles examine the case for mandatory standards for sustainability and nonfinancial reporting in this 2018 Green Paper.
On December 11, 2018, a debate will be held at the Oxford Union regarding the “Motion: This House believes that corporate sustainability reporting should be mandated, and standardised by FASB and IASB, for it to be…
Previously I have written about the importance of the healthcare, resource transformation, and food and beverage sectors to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The underlying data for that blog are based on…
In this post, I will make three reflections based on an article Mike Krzus and I wrote with the help of Carlos Solano, “Constructing Bank of America’s 2017 Mock Integrate Report: Experiment No. 3.” But first, a…
Previously I have written about the importance of the healthcare and resource transformation sectors to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The underlying data for that blog are based on a paper “The…
In a previous blog, “The Importance Of The Healthcare Sector For The Sustainable Development Goals,” I discussed the ways in which this sector is important to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The…
In an earlier blog, I wrote about ExxonMobil’s 2016 Mock Integrated Report which my collaborator, Mike Krzus, and I put together. This was an experiment. We were surprised to learn that Mike was able to put together…
It is now widely accepted that the private sector, both companies and investors, is essential to accomplishing the 169 targets in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Of course, there is a tension here. The…
Abstract The world has great expectations for how the private sector, both companies and investors, can support the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In fact, it is generally believed that these goals cannot…
When 193 member states launched the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the United Nations in 2015, it was not clear how businesses could contribute to an agenda that covered such wide-ranging topics as…
My colleague and co-author, Mike Krzus, and I have just published a paper titled “Constructing ExxonMobil’s First Integrated Report: An Experiment.” In it we describe how we constructed a 2016 integrated report for…
Companies and investors are being asked to support the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 — what some have described as “the closest thing the Earth has to a strategy”— since the public sector alone…
Something remarkable and little noticed happened on February 6, 2018. In its first quarter earnings call of the year the medical devices company BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company) began its journey of including…
Companies and investors are being asked to support the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 — what some have described as “the closest thing the Earth has to a strategy”— since the public sector alone…
Billions of people cannot meet their basic needs for food, shelter, and health. Resource scarcity and a lack of access to basic services disproportionately affect the poor and marginalized. Genuine inclusive economic…
On January 6, 2017, JANA Partners, a New York–based activist hedge fund, and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) sent a letter to Apple’s board of directors that may change the future of…
There are a growing number of investment opportunities for companies and projects developing innovative solutions to environmental and social problems. Capital in support of such initiatives, however, has not been…
Last month, The Boston Consulting Group released their findings on total societal impact (TSI). To recap, TSI is not a single metric; it is a collection of measures and assessments that capture the economic, social,…
The debate about whether companies can do well financially by doing good things for the world is settled. The answer is “Yes, in certain circumstances.”
How hard will it be for companies to meet the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures? Not as hard as many might think.
When Swedish telecommunications company Telia issued an announcement of its new commitment to sustainable business practices, the shift in strategic priority renewed shareholder trust.
Consensus continues to build in the corporate community that in delivering total shareholder return (TSR) for their investors, businesses must also consider the impact they will have on society in doing so. The…
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), an independent body that has pioneered sustainability reporting from a niche practice to one now adopted by organizations around the…
Human trafficking, essentially modern slavery, is a large and growing practice, although most people are unaware of its existence and extent. Pope Francis has called it a plague on humanity. The NGO Human Rights…
It’s well known now that climate change poses a significant risk to society. The problem is getting business leaders to start recognizing how their businesses may be affected.
In November last year, Richard Howitt took over the role of CEO of the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) from Paul Druckman. A Member of the European Parliament for over 20 years, Howitt is an…
I sat down with Lois Guthrie, the founding director of the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB), to discuss how the organization is positioned in the reporting space, and how the Task Force on Climate-related…
There is a curious anomaly in the corporate world in the United States that is putting the beneficiaries of U.S. corporate pension funds at risk. Stated very simply, while more and more companies are proclaiming…
Except for the last remaining climate change deniers, of which there are still a surprising number, it is generally acknowledged that many of the oil reserves that have already been discovered are “stranded assets.”…
Private equity (PE) firms have an enormous opportunity to create social value and improve the environment and, in doing so, improve their financial returns. This can be done by integrating environmental, social, and…
What would it look like for the board of directors of a major corporation to consider, in a meaningful or material way, stakeholders beyond its shareholders? To be sure, many have argued that companies ought to look…
It might not happen today or tomorrow, but soon you may get the chance to invest in a socially responsible investment in your 401(k) plan.
The Spring 2016 proxy votes supporting the 2°C stress test resolutions at last week’s Annual General Meetings of ExxonMobil (38.2%) and Chevron (41%) give cause for both celebration – and concern. These votes suggest…
“The new SASB standards allow us—for the first time—to identify and measure exposure to climate risk across companies and industries. Climate change affects all markets and presents risks that investors can no longer…
Let me start by asking a question. What do China Steel, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Nestle, Walmart, CalSTRS, and the ACCA all have in common?
“We are just beginning our transformation as the Digital Industrial Company.” So says General Electric Chairman of the Board and CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt in the “GE 2015 Integrated Summary Report” published on March 14,…
What is the biggest barrier to sustainable development? There are many, but I’d like to flag one that I think hasn’t received enough attention so far: boards of directors of companies and asset managers. Too many are…
“The combination of the weight of scientific evidence and the dynamics of the financial system suggest that, in the fullness of time, climate change will threaten financial resilience and longer-term prosperity.…
It is generally agreed that COP21 was a great success. In welcoming the historic climate agreement, Executive Director of the UN Global Compact Lise Kingo said that: “Never before have we seen this level of…
Last week I had the privilege of participating in “The Future of the Corporation: Business for Society Conference” held in Santiago. The conference was organized by the ESE Business School of Universidad de los Andes…
The basis for this post is a new Harvard Business School Working Paper1 that expands on the idea of the climate custodians within the unique governance context of the Statement of Significant Audiences and…
On September 22, 2016 CECP, ‘The CEO Force for Good,’ will launch its Strategic Investor Initiative (SII). The purpose of the SII is to shift the conversation between companies and their investors from one about…
In a recent article, my friend and colleague Georg Kell, Founder of the United Nations Global Compact, introduced the idea of “Generation S.” He defines it as a set of people who understand the power of…
Last Friday morning on my drive to Beijing Capital International Airport, the air was so thick with pollution from carbon intensive coal consumption that you could see it gently pushing against the buildings and…
In the 2014 Government Report delivered on March 5, 2015 at the Third Session of the 12th National People’s Congress, Premier of the State Council Li Keqiang noted that “China’s economic development has entered a new…
Last month, I wrote here about how the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals create real opportunities for business leaders based on market opportunities in solving the world’s greatest environmental and social…
With our recent news bulletins dominated by the presidential campaign, Hurricane Patricia and the upcoming World Series playoff between the Kansas City Royals and the New York Mets, it is likely that most of us…
We routinely hear board directors, CEOs, and CFOs of publicly-listed corporations refer to shareholders as owners of the corporation. Under this thinking, it is natural to conclude that the board’s duty is to its…
“If we we’re serious about meaningful reporting on ESG performance, the focus should be on targeted, business-relevant metrics and a simple, transparent reporting process. The era of being part of a green ranking for…
The world’s top credit agencies are dumping claims that their research is “independent” in a shift that follows accusations of bias and allegations that their faulty ratings helped trigger the worst financial crisis…
The market continues to show growing interest in how well companies are performing across a broad range of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) dimensions. Partly as a result, the companies themselves are…
Corporate sustainability has captured the attention of much of the world over the last few years. Trends including the growth of nongovernmental organizations and movements such as Occupy Wall Street suggest that the…
The broader societal concern about sustainability has grown from almost nothing in the early 1990s to a dominant theme today. Meanwhile, leaders of major corporations worldwide are increasingly facing the challenge…
ABSTRACT Dow Chemical Company, which was founded in 1894, is now the second-largest chemical company in the world. From the outset, the company has been committed to high-technology research and commercial innovation…
During the past two decades, more and more companies have volunteered to provide “corporate social responsibility” or “sustainability” reports that include information about their environmental, social, and…
ABSTRACT While conceptually elegant, the belief that a corporation’s role is to maximize value for shareholders is under increasing challenge as society’s expectations for companies change. An equally elegant new…
To what extent companies contribute to a sustainable society is a question increasingly important, not only to the companies themselves, but also to investors, the countries they do business in, and civil society in…
Over 1,000 supporters of corporate reports that go beyond the financials to include information about a company’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance are attending the Global Reporting…
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