Sustainability
Tenured Harvard Business School professor, now at Oxford University.
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 to install a “poison pill” to prevent Musk from attempting a hostile takeover.
Poison pills evoke a bygone era of corporate raiders when activist investors got saddled with the reputation that they have today in some quarters, even though their business model has changed dramatically. Rather than being Viking-like corporate raiders (my wife and I are currently watching “The Last Kingdom” about King Alfred in the late 9th century so this metaphor comes readily to mind), most activist investors now function as an important mechanism for ensuring corporate accountability on both financial and sustainability performance.
Robert G. Eccles of Saïd Business School, University of Oxford is the author of a number of books on integrated reporting, sustainability and the role of business in society. His focus is on sustainability from both a company and investor perspective. Professor Eccles is also involved in a variety of initiatives to embed environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues in real world decision making. One of these is the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), of which he was the founding chairman. In 2018, Professor Eccles was selected by Barron’s as one of the top 20 influencers on ESG investing.
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