How to Convince CEOs to Support Climate Action at the Expense of Profits

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Businesses require a thriving, stable society to operate, and cannot survive in a failing world. There is now widespread consensus that limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5℃ requires fundamental changes in sectors like energy,…

Now Is the Time to Prepare for the Economic Shocks of Battling Climate Change

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Shedding reliance on fossil fuels is key to making the leap from a carbon-intensive present to a greener future. Experts say that smart planning and transparent policymaking can ease the transition—and balance the worst financial risks. The…

Big American Companies Have Only Begun Tackling the Racial Wealth Gap

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Companies need to do more internally to ensure that these actions evolve into the profound and sustainable reforms that are needed. Last month, our country marked the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s brutal murder. It has been a…

Any True ESG Focus on Executive Pay Needs a Link to Employee Engagement

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Too often “of material value to shareholders” is used as the great duck out on fundamental questions of human values. More than half of the 100 Financial Times Stock Exchange CEOs have had their salaries frozen this year. The news comes…

Change the Paradigm, Change the System: A Conversation with Denise Hearn

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Listen to "#27 - Change the Paradigm, Change the System: A Conversation with Denise Hearn" on Spreaker. In this episode of the Breaking the Fever podcast, we speak with Denise Hearn about the most significant opportunities and concerns with…

How Investors Can Lead the Shift Toward Stakeholder Capitalism

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The overwhelming focus on correlating highly imperfect ESG metrics with financial performance risks drowning out more promising avenues of research on how to meaningfully encourage a broader and longer-term approach to value creation. It’s…

Survey: Business Leaders See Ethics as a Competitive Advantage

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Business leaders, according to the study, “feel a growing responsibility to exert their influence on broader societal challenges, from climate change to deforestation to racial and gender equality.” ESG is turning out to be an abbreviation…

The Psychology of Shifting to Stakeholder Capitalism

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The key driver for a shift toward stakeholder capitalism is unlikely to be a presentation on the metrics, and far more likely to be the conversation an executive is having with his teenage children at the dinner table. As a result of COVID-19’s…

The Real Test for McKinsey After Rejecting CEO Kevin Sneader

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McKinsey’s pitch is that it helps clients compete at the leading edge of business innovation. It should apply this model to its own operations. Last month, McKinsey’s 650 global partners turned down CEO Kevin Sneader’s bid…

Uber Becomes an Unlikely Icon in the Rise of ESG in Corporate Governance

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The law is increasingly being used to get justice long after the damage done, which suggests there are holes in the values-governance-regulation-enforcement net. Wrestling with the concept of better corporate governance in a world where…